When I look back, I realise that quite a high proportion of my childhood nightmares would have been inspired by the huge advertising billboard which stood adjacent to my school and barraged my fragile young mind with no end of mind-bending imagery across the years, mostly promotions for drink and cigarettes, along with the occasional car ad featuring a scantily clad woman. This was back in the day where you were still allowed to advertise cigarettes using static images on billboards and in magazines but you weren't actually allowed to show anyone doing the dirty deed, resulting in a whole bunch of ads with some serious abstract shit going on. Beneath that slew of non-stop confusion was the message that cigarettes and alcohol were awesome and desirable, carefully positioned where flocks of children emerging fresh from the schoolyard couldn't possibly miss them. It's only with hindsight that I realise just how questionable the whole thing was.
One of the last ads I recall seeing on that billboard, before my tenure at that school came to a close, was an advert for Southern Comfort liqueur, featuring a burly-looking bloke sprawled across a porch with a gator in his arms, and the slogan, "Next door they used to have a poodle." Naive kid that I was, I assumed that the "they" from next door referred to man in the image, the implication being that he and his household had replaced their poodle with an alligator because drinking Southern Comfort had made them go a bit funny. Or maybe I knew all too well what had happened to that poodle next door and didn't like to acknowledge it. "What do you think became of the poodle?" I recall asking my mother, presumably in a desperate bid for reassurance. "Hmm, I think the alligator ate it," she said, dashing all of my illusions in one fell swoop. Oh jeez.
The gator ad was from the "Southerners Have Their Own Rules" campaign developed by Court Burkitt and Company in the mid-90s. I believe the idea was to take all of the negative stereotypes associated with people in the southern States and remodel them into something suggesting character, quirkiness and unapologetic individuality. So if you see a bedraggled-looking yokel wading through the wetlands and exclaiming, "When I'm not in the swamp, I'm in the lake! When, I'm not in the lake, I'm in the swamp!", it's to be taken as the mark of a free spirit, and not the kind of shadowy figure you want to keep paddling away from pronto the next time you and your friends are kayaking down the river. Still, the campaign had a decidedly warped flavour that ramped those eccentricities up to vaguely grotesque, even frightening degrees. After all, the clash of ideals in the implied showdown between alligator and poodle could hardly be starker - a poodle suggests daintiness, domestication and continental class, whereas a gator is the very epitome of formidable, untamed aggression. Thus, we have the championing of the demolition of niceties and social graces in favour letting your dark, brutish underbelly hang out without inhibition, which I suppose is an accurate enough summary of the effect that alcohol has upon the brain.
A TV ad followed in 1998, featuring more scenes of our eccentric southerner wrangling his unusual pet. The Hall of Advertising channel over on YouTube identifies this ad as "Wild Bill", and I'm going to assume that that's the name of the man, not the gator. The punchline of the TV ad is exactly the same as on the billboard, only the joke is expanded somewhat so that the gator's palate also encompasses such delicacies as hamsters, rabbits and fish (all pets commonly kept by children, I might note). The TV ad managed the impressive feat of being even more unsettling than its billboard counterpart, what with the eerie, isolated stillness that frames Bill's miniature monologue, and the semi-documentary style matched with the vaguely illusory qualities of the black and white visuals. Bill has the individuality aspect of the campaign down when he concedes that his reptilian chum is "not everybody's idea of a pet. But of course I'm not everybody." Thank Heaven for that, for Bill is clearly the neighbour from Hell, if he's willing to let his gator rampage all over the place and devour the other local pets. Anybody want to write a sequel about the day in which a disgruntled former poodle owner strolled into town dolled up in a pair of alligator-skin boots?
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