The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #26: Kevin My Fruit Bat (Rowntree's Fruit Gums)

When I first started rounding up these Horrifying Advertising Animals just shy of two years ago, Kevin the Rowntree's Fruit Gums Bat was one I had in mind to tackle early on. Somewhere at the back of my mind lurks the omnipresent memory of this freaky animatronic bat who was constantly perturbing his young owner with his assorted confectionery-related eccentricities, and the sight was pretty hard to avoid if you tuned into commercial television at any point throughout my early childhood. As I recall, the ads consisted largely of the Australian-accented kid speaking directly to the camera, while the bat hung around silently in the top background corner, but the punchline was usually a close-up shot of the bat pulling some kind of uncanny facial expression. My reaction to the Kevin campaign, as a small child, was the usual slew of contradictions - I was fascinated by the ads, as a flying fox seemed like the most amazing pet imaginable, and yet there was something about this particular flying fox I found inexplicably unsettling. I suspect that what troubled me about Kevin had to do with the conspiratorial nature of his characteristic sign-offs, and what was communicated in those final, wordless glances. Kevin and the viewer would end up sharing a (often implicit) gag at the expense of his unwitting owner, and I can only assume that the whole notion of being complicit in the machinations of this jerky, non-speaking animatronic while his babbling owner revealed his own ignorance/guilelessness seemed weirdly surreal to my five-year-old brain.

Naturally, Kevin should have been perfect fodder for this retrospective. Only I immediately ran into a brick wall, in that I couldn't find any trace of the critter's existence online. Apparently this once ubiquitous bat had succumbed to the black hole of obscurity, and that omnipresent memory at the back of my mind might as well have been all that remained of him. Actually, it's probably a tad hyperbolic to say I found no trace of Kevin at all - there is an image of him on the official Rowntree's website, which states that campaign began in 1990. I seem to recall Kevin's wild-eyed, upside-down presence gracing daytime television until well into the early 90s. And yet it seemed that nobody set their VCR for the occasion, for there was an absolute dearth of Kevin The Fruit Bat ads on YouTube. This surprised me immensely. All I could do was put Kevin aside and keep periodically checking back to see if videos of the bat would eventually resurface, and it looks as if my patience has finally paid off. Recently, one Kevin ad has appeared online, which I'm guessing is from early on in the campaign. This one doesn't quite follow the formula I described above, in that there's no uncanny close-up of the bat at the end, but the final word nevertheless goes to Kevin's pantomime antics, as his owner naively believes that the bat hasn't detected his underhanded fruit gum indulgence. Here, it's the kid's compulsion to confide his wily techniques with the camera that does him in, for Kevin becomes visibly more animated every time the aforementioned candy is mentioned, although he's canny enough to feign disinterest whenever the kid looks in his direction. It's left to our imaginations as to how this will ultimately play out, but as we are warned in the final still of the ad, "You can't fool a fruit bat."

One thing that immediately strikes me as odd about the above ad is the set - look closely and you'll see that Kevin and his master live in a house without actual doors, just flat representations of doors sketched onto the backdrop. I have to admit, though, that from just this one ad, Kevin himself is nowhere near as unsettling a creation as I had long remembered. The animatronic isn't at all hideous, Kevin has a perfectly sweet and innocuous face, and his animation is lively and endearing. Had the images imprinted on my five-year-old brain simply been playing tricks on me this entire time?

Possibly not. As it turns out, there's another Kevin ad that's been lurking under my nose for the past year, but it was so expertly concealed as to have evaded my search algorithm. This one's missing the beginning of the ad (and there's also a short clip from an unrelated program at the end), but it gives you a better idea of Kevin's quirky expressiveness.

Oh yeah, it's all coming back to me now.

The ad that I can best recall from just memory involved Kevin's owner talking to the camera about the bat's newfound interest in horticulture: "He wants to cross this fruit tree with this gum tree. I wonder what he's trying to grow?" Cue a sardonic sideways glance from Kevin, as if he's confounded by his owner's sheer obtuseness on the matter. If I've got this right, the still at the end said, "They don't grow on trees, Kevin." So whose expense was the gag ultimately at?