Earlier this year, the world bid farewell to Rajan, the last of the ocean-swimming elephants of the Andaman Islands, India, who passed away sometime in the nocturnal hours between July 31st and August 1st 2016 aged 66. One of several Asian elephants utilised by the timber industry and trained to paddle from island to island in the 1970s to assist with transporting logged trees, Rajan became the last left standing when logging was banned on the islands in 2002 and most of his brethren were sold and shipped off to the mainland. Rajan ultimately landed upon the Havelock Island in 2004, where he spent his retirement years when his owner could no longer afford to manage him. Instead, he was taken in by the Barefoot Resort, his ocean-loving antics swiftly making him into a popular tourist attraction and, once the video evidence had made its way to YouTube, a web sensation. Clearly, he was one of the world's most celebrated and unconventional pachyderms, and he'll certainly be missed.
Long before YouTube elevated him to superstardom among the social media crowd, Rajan and his chums had already received worldwide exposure through their appearance in Jacques Cousteau's 1991 documentary film, Andaman, les îles invisibles. A far more curious component of their legacy arrived in 1994, when a swimming elephant became the unlikely star of a commercial for Coca-Cola. One which I recall having a distinctly ambivalent relationship with as a child - at the time, I got a definite skin-crawl sensation whenever this advert was played, although looking back now I'm not sure if I can quite put my finger on why. On the one hand, the spectacle of an elephant gliding through the depths of the ocean could hardly fail to mesmerise, the hefty giant of the animal kingdom suddenly appearing to defy gravity and become impossibly light and aerial. It's an irresistibly astounding sight, yet one which also carries shades of the surreal, and perhaps it was all just a tad too freaky for my ultra-sensitive tastes back then. More likely, it was the jerky movements of the animatronic trunk, which surfaces toward the end of the ad and makes off with a sunbather's Coca-Cola (albeit not without offering consolation in the form of a handful of peanuts, the obvious elephant currency), which really got to me - it looked stilted and alien, and I think I was all too aware of the dissonance between the real-life elephant photography which made up most of the ad and something clearly being operated by a human hand. For whatever reason, I enjoyed a bizarre love/hate relationship with this wholly innocuous, if exceedingly quirky commercial, meaning that I was as strangely fixated with the imagery and scenario as I was totally unnerved by them. I never forgot this ad (no wordplay inten...oh, screw it), and I look back on it with endless affection now.
The swimming elephant commercial was the work of Minneapolis-based advertising agency Fallon McElligott and made its grand debut during the 1994 Wimbledom Finals on NBC. Scenes involving the sunbather and the creepy elephant trunk puppet were filmed in Thailand and spliced with original footage of the swimming elephants in the Andaman Islands. In a contemporary article published the Chicago Tribune, Coke spokesperson Bob Bertini revealed that the original plan had been for the elephant to deliver the beverage in question to the sunbather on the raft, but it was ultimately decided that the scenario would have more resonance if the elephant, with whom the viewer has spent the better part of the commercial's running time, should be the one to make off with the spoils. He also explained the intended link between the product and the peculiar scenario, which apparently foxed a few critics - obviously, there was the entirely straightforward matter of catching the viewer's attention with a memorable image (Bertini cites, vaguely, "a TV nature show" as the inspiration, possibly referring to Cousteau's film), but the idea at heart was that this elephant so craved Coca-Cola that he was willing to go through highly unusual lengths to obtain it, even if that meant traveling stealthily underwater and swiping it from unsuspecting sunbathers. Really, it's the additional detail that the elephant bothers to leave any form of compensation at all on the raft, when it would have made for a serviceable enough twist if he'd simply flat-out stolen the cola, that pushes this ad into that whole extra level of quirk.
Although the above Vimeo-hosted video shows the version of the ad with which I was personally most familiar, the original version was a minute long and, there, the beverage pilfered at the end was a bottle of Diet Coke. Watch it below:
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