Since the late 1980s, UK mattress company Silentnight have been synonymous with the image of a pajama-clad hippopotamus snuggling a tiny yellow duckling, a mismatched mascot combination so beguiling that the official Silentnight website sees fit to dedicate an entire page to answering the burning question as to the thinking behind the imagery, albeit not in any extensive depth:
"Hippo and duck demonstrate the Silentnight beds are suitable for all shapes and sizes."
The combination was less perplexing to those who'd been watching during the early days of the campaign, when the metaphorical significance of having a hulking hippo bedding down with a diminutive duck was more explicitly illuminated. The concept, devised by ad agency BDH/TBWA, was basically a disarming means of alluding to one of the persistent hazards of not sleeping alone - the possibility that your bedfellow might roll over and smother you in your sleep, or at least cause you some serious sleep deprivation. Watching the original Duck and Hippo ads, you are painfully conscious of just how tiny, delicate and, above all, squishable that duckling (played by a real flesh and blood duckling) looks compared to that heavyset hippo (represented by a puppet) - one wayward budge from the hippo and that duck is going to become a very unpleasant stain upon that mattress - but thanks to Silentnight's "revolutionary spring system", the two of them can sleep soundly without the risk of traumatic roll over. The ads have a warm, gentle tone that keeps the implied threat to the duckling from ever seeming too imposing. Nothing conveys a peaceful night's sleep quite like the incongruous sight of a duckling lying calmly beside a hippo, particularly a hippo clad, absurdly, in blue and white striped pajamas, and with the dexterity to operate a bedside lamp. It's a cosy, placating campaign, which is exactly the kind of vibe you want to be giving off when you're hawking bedding materials. So much so that I doubt that anyone was ever ribald enough to question why these two creatures of contrast would be slumbering on the same mattress. A duck and a hippo were sleeping together, and it all seemed so chaste and innocent.
Flash forward to the early 00s, when Duck and Hippo had assumed new animated guises (courtesy of London-based animation studio Bermuda Shorts), in a campaign that suddenly seemed very intent on pushing the narrative that our mismatched bedfellows were indeed a married couple, in a way that went slightly beyond the subtle allegory of the 1980s ads. Now the advertising critters had the gift of the gab (Hippo was voiced by Clive Rowe and Duck by Jane Horrocks), and we see Hippo serenading Duck with a rendition of "You Sexy Thing", a 1975 hit for British soul group Hot Chocolate (which had recently gained renewed interest through its usage in the 1997 film The Full Monty, although by the 00s the world was probably quite ready to move on), worked in principally to make a pun about the mattress "mira-coils" that facilitated their unlikely union. This campaign went further with their whole odd couple vibe, so that Hippo is now loud and exuberant while Duck is discreet and refined. Of course, the more overtly you push the narrative that they are a couple, the harder it becomes to prevent the mind from wandering into seriously impure territory - that is, the notion that Duck and Hippo's nights were possibly not so silent - and really, that's just taking things to a whole other level of freaky. I'm not sure there's a mattress in the world that would make that kind of interaction possible, no matter how loaded it is with mira-coil springs. Suddenly, you become conscious of how tiny and fragile that duck is in quite a different way to the original 1980s campaign. The implicit suggestion of interspecies intercourse between a duck and a hippo is mind-boggling enough, but there's the added complication that Duck is technically only a duckling. As in, a juvenile duck. And while she does speak with the mature vocals of Horrocks, those yellow downy feathers are a dead giveaway. But then, as we learned from the Spuds MacKenzie campaign, we are suckers for an inappropriate subtext, and perhaps we only have our own depraved imaginations to blame if we insist on reading any deeper beneath the surface. Ultimately, all we have is the scenario of a duck and a hippo feeling secure enough in each other's company as to share the same sleeping grounds, a token of interspecies harmony that's intended to convey the blissful possibilities of a restful night's sleep.
Except that in the succeeding ad, from 2003, Hippo and Duck were accompanied by a litter of offspring, in a campaign plugging Silentnight's new line of children's beds. As with A Muppet Christmas Carol, where Kermit and Piggy were able to transmute their ostensibly incompatible genes into a family, we have situation in which the male take on the species of their father and the females their mother. By this point, it was hard to ignore the insinuation that Hippo and Duck were sexual partners, as we had evidence that they were reproducing - added to which, we now had to cope with the mind-boggling biological ramifications as to how this tiny duckling, so fragile that she would be pulverised by her significant other if they weren't sleeping on Silentnight's revolutionary sleep system, somehow managed to carry to term two large mammalians in her juvenile avian body. Back in 2003, I made the point to a friend, who gave me a funny look and suggested that perhaps there was an alternative interpretation to be had of this hippo-duck family, and that their God-mocking litter actually consisted of various children from previous marriages (presumably to members of their own species). Alright, fair point. I suppose we still don't have evidence that the campaign's salacious subtext is actually a reality. All the same, I'll wager that Silentnight knew exactly what they were doing in taunting us with the intimation. And besides, she's still a duckling.
She clearly ain't a duckling. Ducklings can't have babies.
ReplyDeleteI think I just justified iy in my head as 'species of duck that still looks like a duckling, even as adults' or 'they were created in a lab somewhere.