You Never Were One Of Us, Benny! (Skittles)

 

In 1997, Skittles came up with rather a peculiar metaphor through which to tout their virtues, blessing our screens with 30-second advert proposing that the sensation of consuming the chewy fruit-flavoured candies was akin to being gunned down by a mob of anthropomorphic fruit imagined as 1930s-era gangsters. This was Dick Tracy meets the Munch Bunch, if you will. The centres of the confectionery in question were reportedly softer, but their promotional imagery was the stuff of fever dreams. 

 

Snacking on Skittles, as our narrating figure Benny the Banana puts it, is a matter of tempting fate: "You eat Skittles, you expect a hit, right?" It's quickly established that, here, a "hit" equates to summoning CGI humanoids with fruit-shaped heads, who'll barge in bearing oversized weapons and fire barrages of lethal juices your way. It's a scenario that perhaps seems even the more twisted for the fact that the victims of this fruit-inflicted violence are all children (this being an era when kids were still openly the target of a lot of confectionery-based marketing), who are each shown to "die" in ways suggesting that they were at the height of ecstasy as they breathed their last. On the one level, the concept seems almost uncannily morbid, with each child going limp and lifeless while bathed in a colourful puddles evocative of the kind of bodily splatter you would expect to see in an actual massacre. But it's counterbalanced by all the elements of this pseudo-bloodshed being coded to appear more cartoony than threatening (the exaggerated panic of the children, the Looney Tunes-esque movements of the fruity assassins, etc). Crucially, it has a similar kind of winking theatricality as the cream pie metaphor from Bugsy Malone, where a character who takes a pie to the face is regarded as "dead" within the internal narrative, until the final scene, where the play pretence of the gimmick is lovingly exposed. You can tell that it's all for larks. The tone of the ad, while freaky as hell, is certainly a lot less malevolent than that of the Kelloggs Fruit Winders campaign from the early 2000s, which saw humanoid fruits torturing not-so-humanoid fruits in ways that the teenage me found honest-to-god unsettling. It's possible to be playfully twisted without being sadistic.

 

The set-up of the ad has these ill-fated (or not) kids hanging around a warehouse filled with boxes of fruit, which given the theming are presumably intended to be prohibited items (or forbidden fruit - ha!), reinforcing the underlying narrative that to ingest Skittles is to do something exhilaratingly off-limits. I'll admit this much - I get how the metaphor works with regards to the fruit people blasting down those children, but I'm not 100% sure what's meant to be going on as far as Benny the Banana is concerned. I think it's safe to assume that he owns this warehouse, since he has his own personal office in there, but is he meant to be a wily dealer who's supplying these sugar-starved children with their clandestine candies? Are they supposed to be his minions, assisting him in a nefarious fruit trade that, among people whose heads are literally made out of fruit, has uncomfortably cannibalistic implications? Or is he giving them a sincere warning to think carefully about their usage of Skittles, lest they can't handle the inevitable hit? It's complicated by the fact that Benny also serves as our narrator, and I'm detecting a certain degree of glee in his account of how each of these children are successively juiced. I would have guessed that he was in cahoots with the fruity assassins, in supplying them with victims to gun down, until the ending when they decide that he's a traitor and turn their weapons on him. Is that because he owns a warehouse stocked with boxes of arguably cannibalistic goods? Who can say? As a development, it makes perfects sense in terms of how it relates to the product. We're introduced to each armed fruit person and their alliterative/punny monikers - we have Lenny and Larry (Lemon and Lime), Ozzy (Orange), Suzie (Strawberry) and the Undercurrents (Blackcurrant) - and we might notice that this alludes to the mixture of flavours you'll find in a traditional packet of Skittles. Or, specifically, it alludes to the traditional mixture of flavours in packet sold in Europe - the US isn't so big on blackcurrants (I believe that blackcurrant cultivation has a long history of being illegal over there), so the purple Skittles you'll find stateside are grape flavour. We have no bananas in either set, however. It's not that banana flavour Skittles have never been a thing - in 1989, Banana Berry flavours were included in special "Tropical" branded Skittles, and they've occasionally popped up in other variations here and there (rarely as a singular flavour, though; they've typically tended to be part of some combo) - but in terms of the standard European composition, Benny is clearly the odd fruit out, hence why the others denounce him. Why they do so within the internal narrative is still somewhat of a puzzler to me. 

 

Unless...the implication is that he's been ingesting Skittles himself? If that were the case, I would expect there to be some telltale signs, like an empty Skittles wrapper on his desk, but it would explain why they take Benny's unspecified infraction so personally, and why they're so compelled to give him the same gun-firing treatment (presumably not to kill him, but to send him into that same state of juice-induced stupefaction as those children?). Ah well, definite cannibalistic implications there. As the closing slogan proclaims, Skittles contain "real fruit for a real hit". The presence of real fruit is equated with authenticity, and also with a full-on bolt from the blue - a pun that I'm sure would have worked its way into this ad, only blueberries aren't part of this mob either.