With so many brands and restaurants out there all vying for the privilege of becoming your trusted turn-to for an empty calorie pick-me-up, what sort of an atmosphere can we expect to be living in every time we pick up our remote or stroll down the high street? One of all-out warfare, of course. Just as there were "Cola Wars" between Coca Cola and Pepsi and "Coffee Wars" between Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, so too there have been "Burger Wars" in which various fast food chains have pulled out as many marketing guns as they can muster in a never-ending battle for junk food supremacy. In 1997, Taco Bell, a chain dedicated to serving up McDonaldized Tex-Mex, hurled a whole new weapon into the fray in the form of something cute, cuddly and instantly merchandise-friendly, and one of the defining (if flash in the pan) advertising fads of the 1990s was born. Taco Bell banked on the fact that everyone loves pint-sized dogs with disproportionately huge ears, and this being the late 1990s, we were still highly enamored with the novelty of real animals "talking" by way of digital effects which made it appear that their lips were moving (a gimmick popularised by the 1995 movie Babe).
As I noted in my piece on advertisingdom's other famous flesh-and-blood canine, Spuds McKenzie, the Taco Bell Chihuahua was portrayed as a male in the campaign (where he was voiced by Carlos Alazraqui) but was actually a female who went by the name of Gidget. The character's shtick was that he was a feisty soul who had a nose for cheap Mexican-style fast food and a tendency to weird out twentysomething males by hovering beneath them just as they were about to tuck into their Gorditas, pestering them with his catchphrase, "Yo quiero Taco Bell!" (I want Taco Bell). Unlike Spuds McKenzie, whose campaign carried the implicit hint of there being seriously kinky business between himself and the Spudettes, the TBC didn't give a fuck about sexual conquest. Or, more accurately, his libido and his insatiable appetite for greasy fast food were intertwined. The TBC was a heck of a horny devil alright, but he channeled all of his lusty energies into the veneration of Taco Bell, as was illustrated in ads where the dog watches a Taco Bell commercial and compulsively hits the rewind button on his remote like a desperate singleton ogling over a primed spot in their favourite porno rental, calls a hotline where a sensual-sounding female voice asks the dog if he's "into zesty pepperjack sauce", or gazes into a montage of close-up shorts of a taco shell being torn to shreds and whines, "Hurt me!", to it. Equating erotic satisfaction with biting into a cheap, greasy taco is one way of winning your product into the hearts of consumers, but have that eroticism be exhibited by a cuddly dog with an enchilada fetish and you've hit all the right levels of absurdity.
The Taco Bell chain never really caught fire in my homeland (or many foreign markets, for that matter), so the Chihuahua is one of those cultural phenomenons that might have passed me by completely if not for a fortuitous trip I took to the States in July 1999. There, I encountered at least half a dozen people walking around wearing the same t-shirt of a chihuahua standing beside a crudely-constructed cardboard trap, with the slogan, "Here lizard, lizard, lizard..." And on the back, "Uh-oh, I think I need a bigger box." It was a bewildering experience to say the least, for I had no idea why a chihuahua would be conspiring to trap a lizard in a cardboard box, and I was vaguely creeped out by the implication that this unseen lizard was ultimately too much for the chihuahua to handle (...so the lizard ate the chihuahua?). When I left the States, I still didn't get the significance of that t-shirt, but I had figured out the origins of the chihuahua character. For he was absolutely everywhere. The ads were playing non-stop, and you couldn't turn around without seeing all these little bobblehead dogs bearing the Taco Bell logo, or plush toys that spouted the chihuahua's catchphrase if you squeezed its ear. So much so that I developed a strange affection for the little guy, despite never once setting foot inside a Taco Bell throughout my visit, since I associated him with my first ever trip to the US. When I returned, exactly two years later (my parents were really intent on spending their 21st wedding anniversary on Alcatraz island, for some reason), I saw absolutely no trace of the little dog. The t-shirts had clearly dropped out of fashion and the current Taco Bell TV campaign instead featured some guy in an elevator chanting a ditty about his love of steak tacos to the theme from Bonanza. It was as if the chihuahua had upped and vanished from the face of the Earth, having dominated it (or at least the North American part of it) just two years prior. Obviously the campaign had run its course and the chihuahua-less San Francisco of 2001 was a testament to just how rapidly a craze can dissipate and zeitgeist move on. I'd had very limited first-hand experience with the campaign and yet I still felt its absence sorely.
Human beings, being the sick creatures that we are, have a tendency to create our own narratives where the actual one either isn't self-explanatory or is just a little too self-explanatory for our liking, and inevitably various stories seeped out about sweet little Gidget meeting all manner of gruesome fates, from being squished by a ham-fisted boom mic operator to falling into a deep-fat fryer and ending up as the secret ingredient in some unsuspecting chump's Gordita. It was the exact same deal with Spuds McKenzie about a decade prior. In reality, Gidget lived to the ripe old age of 15 and passed away after suffering a stroke on 21st July 2009. After her career as a taco shill was cut short, she landed additional gigs in an advertisement for Geico car insurance and in the movie Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003). According to this Snopes article, Gidget's abrupt jettisoning by Taco Bell was rooted in the fact that, despite the enthusiastic response to the character, the campaign didn't actually work magic in convincing the public that their tacos were any good. A chihuahua might appear to like them, but then chihuahuas like licking their nether-regions.
So what makes the Taco Bell Chihuahua a candidate for the "horrifying" tag (other than the dubious grub (s)he was shilling)? In this case, it's in the company you keep. That "Lizard" shirt I mentioned earlier...well, I figured out its origins eventually.
Roland Emmerich's all-American take on Godzilla (1998) isn't too fondly remembered. Whenever people do bring it up, it's usually to cite it as an epitome of the kind of commercial crassness that characterised Hollywood blockbusters in the 1990s - because what could be more odious than the Hollywoodization of a beloved Japanese property (complete with one of the most unashamedly obnoxious promotional taglines of all-time) that seemed every bit as intent on shoving tacos down our gullets as diverting us with the spectacle of a giant lizard stomping on buildings for over two hours (good grief, was Godzilla really 139 minutes long?). So oppressive was the Godzilla-Taco Bell coalition that the Taco Bell Chihuahua was effectively pigeonholed as Godzilla's promotional sidekick, appearing in an additional spot in which TBC was seen placing an order through a drive-thru intercom on Godzilla's behalf. "Hey, Godzilla, want something to drink?" the dog casually shouts out to his reptilian chum, as if they were a couple of college roomies out on a bender. The especially prominent nature of the product tie-ins was singled out by many critics as symptomatic as everything vile and wrong-headed about the film's aesthetic, with Peter Bart of Variety remarking that, "To many, Godzilla has become the ultimate example of a marketing campaign in search of a movie. The movie was seemingly made, not to entertain audiences, but to help sell tacos and T-shirts." Once Godzilla had been marked out for the trash heap of regrettable late 90s pop culture novelties (right down there with TY's Beanie Babies), the unfortunate little chihuahua was inevitably destined to have its own image tainted through association.
Ah well, nostalgia displaces all nausea eventually, right? A lot of what we agreed at the time was destined for the trash heap of 90s culture is now suddenly regarded as the height of cool, so on that basis, I wouldn't rule out a reappearance from the chihuahua some time in the future (even if Gidget herself is no longer with us). Assuming the backstage legal disputes involving the character haven't left too bad a taste in Taco Bell's mouth, that is.
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