It's a scientific fact that mechanical pink rabbits who bang away relentlessly on drums are horrifying. I can't quite put my finger on why, exactly; I just have nightmare visions of whatever circle of Hell I'm banished to being populated with sheaves of the evil bastards, all pounding away non-stop while the music from Roysters' "A is for Antelope" ad plays on a loop in the background. One of the sickest twists in the whole of advertisingdom is that, thanks to a couple of dueling campaigns, the world ended up with not just one, but two mascots of this ilk. The "battery bunny" is a familiar concept the world over, but a lot of folks are blissfully unaware that there are multiple rabbits matching that description, so you may have to look at a person's geographical location to decipher which battery bunny they have in mind. If they're from Europe or Australia, then odds are they mean the Duracell Bunny, the original of the two. If they're from the US, it's a safe bet they're alluding to his wilder and wackier counterpart, the Energizer Bunny, who usurped his Duracell nemesis and then some on American soil but doesn't appear to have made much of an impact elsewhere. Thank fuck.
The conceit for the original Duracell Bunny campaign, which launched in 1973, has to be one of the ghastliest ever devised by man. The image of an entire army of little drummer rabbits chugging away mindlessly, gradually slowing down and giving way to the cold thrust of inertia until only one is left standing, is a flagrantly unpleasant one. Check out this version from the early 1980s and tell me that your skin isn't crawling. It doesn't help that it's topped off by a pretty heinous-sounding leitmotif.
1988, and enter the Energizer Bunny, whose debut commercial was conceived (by D.D.B. Chicago Advertising) as a direct send-up of Duracell's campaign. Here, a rabbit powered by a rival battery (not specified, but blatantly Duracell) is upstaged by a surprise entrance from the Energizer Bunny, whom we are told was purposely excluded from the competition in order to give the unsaid rival an unfair advantage. Whereas the Duracell Bunny was intended to look cute, innocuous and child-like (I'm sure that was the idea, anyway), the Energizer was specifically designed to emphasise 'tude. He's a bigger, brasher and louder rabbit than his Duracell counterpart, as we can tell from his protrusive choice of bass drum and those all-important sunshades. As such, it doesn't really matter that we technically don't see him outlast his unnamed nemesis (all we see is the rival rabbit's ear lopping over in frustration) - it's clear from his unashamedly extravagant display that he's the leporine who really means business.
The Energizer Bunny proved such a smashing success that he went onto completely eclipse the Duracell Bunny in US territories, until he proved iconic enough to work as a standalone character in subsequent ads. Emphasis shifted to the amazing longevity of the Energizer battery in general, with the Energizer-powered rabbit being depicted as an unstoppable force that nothing on Earth could possibly pin down, and the tagline "It just keeps going and going..." acting as a solemn reminder that, long after civilisation has crumbled and humanity reduced to a smattering of fossilised remains, this mechanical whiz kid will still be roaming atop our wasteland burial ground with much the same unlimited zeal as ever. As we got deeper into the 1990s, it transpired that the Energizer Bunny had attracted a wide array of foes beyond his Duracell counterpart, with numerous villains from all facets of pop culture all vying to take a crack at being the one to finally stop the infernal rabbit in his tracks. We saw the Bunny successfully fend off attacks from the likes of Wile E Coyote, the Wicked Witch of The West and Boris & Natasha (although surely nobody was terribly surprised - those guys didn't exactly have the most stellar track records). Most eager for the Bunny's metaphorical blood were fictitious rival brand "Supervolt", who had attempted to manufacture their own knock-off mascot (somewhat ironically, given that the Energizer Bunny was himself a knock-off creation) the Supervolt Weasel, with little success.
As for the Duracell Bunny, he is still running (pun intended) in several non-US territories, although he has since ditched his drumsticks, with newer ads tending to focus on his prowess in various sporting activities. The modern Duracell Bunny is also now rendered in CGI, as opposed to being represented by some of the most heinous-looking toys imaginable. I'll happily take a smiling computer-generated rabbit over a vacant-looking stuffed one.
Somehow or other, the world has proven big enough to sustain two battery-guzzling pink rabbits for more than a quarter-century, although their co-existence hasn't been without its share of contention. In 1992, Duracell and Energizer reached an agreement to split their rabbit rights over different global territories, but in 2016 Energizer filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Duracell, arguing that they had violated their long-standing agreement in enabling Duracell products featuring their own pink rabbit to be imported from Europe and sold in US outlets. The case ultimately went in Duracell's favour.
The question remains, then, as to which of the two pink drummer rabbits I consider to be the more diabolical creation. I will admit that, although I deem those early Duracell ads to be downright shuddersome, as a mascot there's something about the Energizer Bunny that seriously rubs me the wrong way. The original intention behind his character was to lampoon the Duracell campaign, and as such he was purposely designed to be a caricature, with highly exaggerated features geared toward playing up his bombastic and in-your-face qualities, and that gives him a definite air of grotesqueness. Not to mention that the whole, "It just keeps going and going..." mantra does have a sinister flip-side - the rabbit's shtick is that he's relentless and never gives up, and I somehow doubt that I'm the only one who's ever entertained nightmarish fantasies about how I would manage if he was ever on my trail, a pitiless assassin determined to hunt me down wherever I go. I mean, we're encouraged to see the rabbit as a force for good because we've seen him take on Darth Vader et al, but how much do we really know about what's rattling on inside that battery-powered head of his? He is a force who keeps going and going literally for going's sake, which some find laudable. The Energizer Bunny has become something of a cultural icon to those who perceive his ever-lasting battery power as an analogue for inexhaustible pep and enthusiasm, with the character's Wikipedia article noting that, "In North America the term "Energizer Bunny" has entered the vernacular as a term for anything that continues endlessly, or someone that has immense stamina...Several U.S. presidential candidates have compared themselves to the bunny, including President George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Howard Dean in 2004."
And yet this extensive admiration is rooted in a lie, which is neatly summarised by a character from the 1997 film Grosse Pointe Blank, who says of the rabbit (all while sounding as if he's about to break out into a song from Hair), "It's got no brain, it's got no blood, it's got no anima! It just keeps on banging on those meaningless cymbals, and going and going!" Sure, he got the rabbit's signature instrument wrong, but his basic point still stands. From this perspective, the Energizer Bunny's existence is not one of boundless vitality, but one of empty monotony, his unending drive dictated solely by the battery that clings to his hind leg like a blood-sucking parasite, dooming him to keep on grinding away, Red Shoes-style, for all eternity. Picture again that image I alluded to earlier of the solitary bunny, millennia from now, wandering the decaying wastelands where once stood fields and houses, with no one left to try and bring a halt to his perpetual frenzy, and you have to wonder where this sprightly rabbit ever suspected he was going all this time.
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