I realise that in calling this guy "horrifying" I risk catching the ire of ferret lovers the world over, as I am aware that he was at one time or another hailed as something of a folk hero among the mustelid-inclined. He was voted "Ferret of The Century" by Modern Ferret magazine in November 1999, with editor Mary R. Shefferman describing him as a "positive, accurate image of ferrets as happy, fun-loving, and social creatures - an image that is lacking in many portrayals of ferrets in the media." It's no secret that weasels have something of a public image problem - last time, when I covered the long-standing rivalry between the Duracell and Energizer bunnies, I cited a commercial with the latter in which a fictitious battery company unsuccessfully attempted to enter the fray with their own mascot, the Supervolt Weasel, which was presented as an obvious dud. So when the modern ferret owner gets something as rare and wonderful as a ferret mascot who's allowed to spread his ferret-ness left, right and centre and it's played up as a grand thing, then of course they're going to grab hold of it with both hands and savour it for all it's worth (I'm a rat owner, so I completely understand).
Real ferrets are, of course, adorable. This guy, though? Eh, sorry to say it, but he looks like a taxidermy job gone weirdly haywire. I've always found the Budweiser Ferret to be unsettling, with his jerky puppetry, strangely distorted facial features and incomprehensible babbling. His creepiness finally reached its peak with an ad where his dirty little secret came back to haunt him - it transpired that in the summer of 1979 he'd posed nude for a dubious publication and risked bringing shame upon the Budweiser brand now that the evidence had been unearthed (of course, if the Ferret really had posed nude in 79 it would have made him more than two decades old, which would be remarkably long-lived for his species). Lately, family cinema seems to have developed a hard-on for scenes in which in which anthropomorphic animals appall everyone around them by stripping down and strutting around au naturel; there was a drawn-out sequence in Disney's Zootopia that took place within a nude health spa and the recent Peter Rabbit movie mined an entire running gag out Mr Tod's apparent penchant for bearing his all at parties. I'd say that the joke had already been taken to its freakiest possible heights with this ad two decades prior, however. Here, it's all the more absurd because the Ferret never wears clothing in his regular stint; in fact, he's more heavily-clad than usual in the one shot which shows him decked out in a bathrobe. Nevertheless, there is something profoundly disturbing about being bombarded with so static images of this undead-looking Ferret in provocative poses and getting up to interspecies fondling with a Persian cat. I do not judge Ferret for anything he might have done when he was young and desperate for work. But I do wish that I could replace some of those images within my mind.
I've singled the Ferret out as the disturbing apple of this particular bunch, yet when I reflect back on it I have to concede that the entire concept of this campaign was frankly a bit warped. We do have to go back quite a bit before we get to the Ferret, who was a relatively late addition to the "Swamp Gang" line-up. The campaign first launched during the Super Bowl XXIX in 1995, beginning with a strange but simple ad in which a trio of frogs croaked out the brand name "Budweiser" syllable by syllable, with the final reveal that the frogs are gazing up at a neon bar sign promoting said beer, and thus their ostensibly random croaking transforms into something resembling religious awe. I can see why this ad struck such a nerve at the time - the nocturnal swamp setting is wonderfully atmospheric - but really, just what were we to assume was going on in this particular scenario? That Bud is such a magical brand that all of nature feels an inherent reverence toward it, to the extent that swamp-dwelling amphibians are compelled to form religious cults around it? Or is it some kind of commentary on man's ruination of the natural world and/or the insidious nature of advertising, in which the local wildlife are forced to stare at our ugly brands and slogans for so long that they start incorporating them into their physiological functions?
There were subsequent Budweiser commercials featuring the frogs, but the campaign really took off in 1998, when the Swamp Gang was revisited and expanded to give the frogs a couple of rivals in the form of Louie and Frankie the CHAMELEONS (capitalised for emphasis because I've seen so many folks refer to them as iguanas...and why? The two lizard families aren't remotely similar, people). Louie and Frankie were far wordier characters than the frogs, which changed the tone of the campaign significantly. The lizards apparently auditioned to be the official Budweiser mascots for the original 95 spot but were bested by the frogs; by 98, Frankie was clearly long over it but Louie had been nursing a grudge for three solid years and his petty bitterness toward the frogs grew increasingly malevolent with each new ad, until it became inevitable that he would resort to foul play. Which is where the Ferret comes in. Truthfully, he did not start out as an altogether positive representation of his species, for he was originally an amateur assassin hired by Louie to rub out the frog trio by knocking the neon sign they revered so much into the swamp and zapping them into oblivion. Unfortunately for Louie, Ferret makes for a pretty incompetent hitman, and the frogs survived the attempt on their lives. Nevertheless, I'll never forget the deep shock I felt the first time I saw the assassination ad and couldn't be totally sure as to whether they'd really killed the frogs or not. It was a grim final image, as we panned past those smoking lily pads while Louie makes some macabre quip about how sooner or later every frog has to croak. I don't recall quite how long a gap there was between that ad and the "happy" ending where we found out that the frogs survived, but there was a time when I half-expected that to be the end of the entire Swamp Gang arc, and it unsettled me so.
The Louie, Frankie and Ferret series also rejigged the dynamic of the campaign in that the swamp critters were now very aware that they were on the set of a series of commercials and that their primary purpose was to shill beer. So once the frog arc had concluded and the Ferret was brought on as the brand's new spokesperson(!), it continued to get wackier and wackier, until we found ourselves at the point where we were staring at the Ferret's nudies. What a time to be alive.
The Swamp Gang represented a last gasp of glorious insanity as we neared the end of the 20th century, slightly apprehensive about what lay ahead and whether or not the world would go to pieces the second we hit the Y2K. Enter the 2000s, and it didn't take the world too long to go to shit, although not in the way we'd envisioned. It was a blander and less enlivening time all-round, and nothing was more telling of this than when the Swamp Gang were dislodged from zeitgeist to be replaced by that whole "Whassup?" thing. Which I still don't get to this day. There was enough of an overlap between the two campaigns for Frankie to denounce the Whassup phenomenon as "a disease", and I'm with him on that one, sorry.
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