If there was an advertising character who simultaneously terrified me and had my deepest sympathies, it's the Red Car from Milky Way's "Red vs Blue" campaign. The animated TV ad, which first appeared in 1989, depicted a race between two auto-mobiles, a red 1951 Buick Roadmaster and a blue 1959 Cadillac on an hours-long journey between the fictional towns of Lunchville and Dinnertown, located in some kind of alternate reality mid-century America. A mid-century America where the cars are not only living beings, but some are apparently predisposed to devouring anything unfortunate enough to come into close proximity with them. The ad was of course a cunningly-conceived metaphor, with Red and Blue symbolising two contrasting strategies for making it through the long, monotonous hours between lunch and dinner. Red is a compulsive snacker who consumes anything indiscriminately (from trucks to prickly trees, as we are both told and shown), while Blue eats only one item along route - the chocolate/nougat concoction manufactured by Mars and named for a galaxy - which gives him the energy to complete the journey without putting a dent in his appetite. Ultimately, the binge-eating Red is forced to drop out of the competition (literally), as he gets too overloaded to reach Dinner, while the leaner of our two sugar junkies speeds on to victory. You may already be detecting something slightly questionable about this whole scenario - it's not the broader issue as to why a car would be compelled to eat the local scenery in the first place, although we will get to that.
The ad ends with Blue passing a neon billboard proclaiming the Milky Way to be "The sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite." It's not clear to me on what science Mars were basing this audacious claim; I kept my eyes peeled for a footnote or disclaimer and couldn't see one. I suspect it basically all came down to the fact that Milky Way bars were lighter in density than their close cousins, the Mars Bar and the Marathon. Or Snickers.
Not surprisingly, there was some backlash against the campaign from anti-sugar lobbyists, who questioned why Mars was positing a candy bar as a healthy between-meal snack. The Independent Television Commission sided with Mars, on the grounds that the ads clearly depicted indiscriminate snacking as a negative thing via the cautionary example of Red. I'm not sure if that ruling holds up to scrutiny, however, as Mars weren't exactly promoting healthy eating habits, but rather championing the lesser of two very blatant evils. The ad's perspective on nutrition is obviously quite superficial; a Milky Way is hailed as a sensible snacking choice because it "won't ruin your appetite", as opposed to how much good it actually does the body. We all know that there's a plethora of healthier options the Blue Car could have chosen over a Milky Way. And, let's face it, the explicit encouragement to eat candy in between meals always was something of a dubious marketing angle for a campaign targeted primarily at children. Keep in mind, though, that this was an era when junk food advertisers basically had free rein over children's media - they were, after all, what was keeping commercial kids' television afloat. The campaign lived on long enough to garner a sequel, this one science fiction themed, focussing on a race between a red meteor and a blue satellite. Same narrative, different dress, only in this case I cry foul, as it looks to me like the twin planets Boss n' Nova deliberately sabotaged the meteor's run. Where was the referee?!
When the campaign debuted, I would have been four years old, and I suspect the central metaphor was lost on me. Pretty much every food product advertised on television suggested that you would acquire super powers if you signed their figurative dotted line - whether that power entailed turning into a fuzzy yellow monster (Sugar Puffs), making your enemies flee in terror (Weetabix), or just making you inhumanly cacophonic (Trio) - and I doubt that I saw Blue Car's example as any different. I was much more preoccupied with the nature of the scenario and how freakishly disturbing it was. The idea of a living, breathing car that lunges at everything it passes and violently packs it into its non-existent digestive system is like something out of your darkest nightmares, or at least one of the more warped Monty Python sketches. And having Red eat a truck, of all things, certainly raises a barrage of uncomfortable questions. If the Red Car and the Blue Car are alive, then what reason is there to believe that the truck isn't either? And if it isn't alive, then isn't the implication that Red ate it with the driver inside? In either case, would that be considered murder? Or maybe just the law of the jungle in this auto-mobile society? To be fair, Blue did look pretty intimidated when the truck came into view, so an argument can possibly be made that Red swallowed in self-defence. It is admittedly difficult to assign moral value when you're dealing with anthropomorphic cars. But already I find this living auto-mobile universe to be infinitely more enthralling than Pixar's attempt.
The Red Car, of course, was supposed to come off as somewhat monstrous. We're clued in right from the start as to which of the two we're intended to sympathise with by the nature of their respect smiles (more of a grimace in Red's case) - they gave Red pointy predator teeth and Blue a cheesy, non-threatening grin. Here's the thing, though - as much as that Red Car and his insatiable voraciousness terrified me, he was always the one I sincerely rooted for. I'd like to say that I always knew, on a subconscious level, what that Blue Car was really up to, but I think that Red appealed to me because, in the end, his freaky eating habits were as endearing as they were alarming - that hair-raising moment where he swallows a truck and its hypothetical occupant whole was, on top of everything else, delightfully animated. Blue, by contrast, was frankly rather dull. He might have had all the glory, at least as far as the ad was concerned, but there's no question that Red had all the character. As such, I was always really bummed by that ending where he not only loses the race (inevitable though it was), he drops down a ravine and we never even learn if he came out again in one piece (and the frenzied way the narrator screams "Oh no, the bridge has gone!" was ultimately more chilling to me than anything Red himself got up to). There was a print version of the ad that showed up in various children's comics in the early 90s (nowhere were impressionable young eyes free from Mars's nefarious agenda) which had a less gruesome outcome for Red - there, he simply couldn't fit through a gate to the final location - but it's the principle, dammit. Red was a colourful anti-hero, while Blue was a flashy corporate shill.
Like this ad or lump it, it is a fondly-regarded classic, enough so that Red and Blue were later returned to television screens in 2009 in time for its twentieth anniversary. The world they lived in had visibly changed, however. For one, they were no longer competing in hours-long races between Lunchville and Dinnertown, but Playville and Light Town. And the explicit message being conveyed by Mars had undergone some notable revisions. 2009 was an entirely different ball game - after decades of bombarding children with non-stop encouragement to eat unhealthy food products, people were suddenly starting to get very jumpy about the consequences. Childhood obesity had become one of the hot issues of the day, and there were now much tighter restrictions on how junk foods were allowed to promote themselves. Any suggestion that candy bars could constitute a wholesome between-meals snack was now a huge no-no. In its place, we're told that Blue chose the Milky Way, not because it wouldn't spoil his appetite, but because it's "something that tastes just right", while the neon sign he passes at the end instructs us to "Lighten up and play." A common concession that junk food marketing now made was to include some kind of disclaimer about the importance of counterbalancing their consumption with regular physical activity, and I presume that the switch from Lunch/Dinner to Play/Light was an attempt to change the implied metaphor from between-meal snacking to rewards between exercise sessions. The implication now, I suppose, is that Red indulges so much that he leaves himself too bloated to participate in further activity. Which works well enough for the purposes of the metaphor I guess, although it does make me contemplate the irony that, by the very nature of that metaphor, Red was always a proponent of burning calories as you consumed them. He was, after all, up for running the hours-long route between Lunch/Play and Dinner/Light - the Buick was no couch potato.
No comments:
Post a Comment