Ants are not a critter typically associated with fun. Diligence and cooperation, maybe, but what do they have to teach us about loosening up and savouring existence? In the Aesop's fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant, the ant was exalted as the smart one out of the titular participants, whose foresight and application left it well-prepared for the inevitable changes on the horizon, but it frankly always struck me as rather an insufferable wet blanket (spiteful too), even if the outcome ultimately favoured it. In the late 1990s, two major Hollywood animation studios decided (perhaps not independently) that there was a public appetite for movies in which anthropomorphic ants got to be the heroes, but these were specifically ants who went against the grain of a society in which doing anything other than obediently following the line was generally frowned upon. Grasshoppers, insofar as the Aesopian perspective goes, don't make the best of role models, but Pixar and DreamWorks Animation both betrayed an at least equal distrust of the ants' model of doing things - presumably because it's easy enough to re-construe ant behaviour as a chilling metaphor for a prospective human society in which compliance and efficiency are valued over independence and variety, and individuality goes unacknowledged (unless you're royalty). This particular metaphor is also at the heart of the song "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band, an upbeat tune that nevertheless bows out with the cautionary observation that, "Lights down, you up and die." That Aesopian ant, too stingy to help out a starving grasshopper, presumably makes it through the winter only to repeat the process the following spring; all the same, it will reach its deathbed eventually, upon which it might even feel a smidgeon of envy for that long-deceased grasshopper for taking the time to enjoy things like dancing and sunshine while such pleasures were available to it. "A short life and a merry one at that" could just as easily be applied as the moral to their story, if we care to follow it to its logical conclusion.
In the mid/late-90s, Budweiser ran a campaign offering up a cunning subversion of the popular perception of ants as workaholic sticklers. This particular colony of ants knew how to party down, having discovered the dual blessings of beer and disco. They still toiled diligently, but most of that work seemed to be in service of their passion for Bud, and in transporting it to their colony so as to refuel their disco energies. In doing so, they demonstrated that the ant and grasshopper's respective ethos need not be so inherently at odds, for they worked hard and they played hard.
Contemporaries of the Swamp Gang, the Budweiser ants never made quite the same cultural splash that the frogs did in the West, and their crack at the whip was relatively brief; they had greater longevity in the Chinese market, where the ants proved popular enough to feature in a series of tie-in commercials with the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I'm aware of only five commercials from the stateside campaign, which we may as well name for the disco acts each of them featured...so, "KC & The Sunshine Band", "The Trammps", "KC & The Sunshine Band II", "Chic" and either "McFadden and Whitehead" or "Bee Gees", depending on which version you saw. Something that appeals to me about this campaign is how, in lieu of any actual dialogue or Swamp Gang-esque wisecracks, the disco music effectively supplies the punchline of each ad, and much of the general character. The first of the ads, "KC & The Sunshine Band", debuted in 1995 and was directed by Simon West, the future Con Air director. It depicted the ants marching with a bottle of Budweiser to the pulsating sounds of "Lion" by Kodo, with their abrupt switch to "Get Down To Night" by KC & The Sunshine Band, post-Bud ingestion, supplying the ad's pivotal joke. "KC & The Sunshine Band II", from 1997, was a direct sequel, picking up where the original left off and demonstrating that the ants were an ecologically-sensitive group, who had procedures in place for ensuring that their emptied Bud bottles were not left discarded to clutter up the desert, but were instead relocated to the nearest recycling bins. "Lion" was once again heard while the ants performed their gruelling labour, but cause for celebration (the bottle successfully reaching the recycle bin, and not pulverising one of their number in the process) was greeted by another KC & The Sunshine Band track, "That's The Way (I Like It)".
The ants had an enemy who appeared in two of the spots - a giant anteater (actually a puppet created by The Character Shop) who was, unsurprisingly, out to guzzle as many ants as possible down its elongated mouth (note: according the backdrop, the ants were located near Vasquez Rocks in California, which is somewhat contrary to the presence of the anteater, an animal native only to Central and South America, but then we mustn't be sticklers for realism in ads centred around disco-dancing insects). In one of its two appearances, in the "Chic" ad, the anteater actually succeeded, although the story didn't quite end there. Having gorged its fill of ants, the anteater couldn't resist helping itself to the bottle of Bud Ice they were in the process of transporting, inadvertently restoring the party spirit to the ingested ants and enabling them to disco down to "Le Freak" inside the anteater's guts. Beyond an initial momentarily startled reaction, this doesn't appear to bother the anteater too much, and it carries on its way. From the outset it looks deceptively like a draw - as though ants and anteater have figured out how to co-exist in perfect harmony, thanks to the miracle of Bud Ice - but Bud and Chic are not going to protect those ants from the gruesome process of digestion, so I think it's fair to award this win unambiguously to the anteater.
The anteater's second appearance helped to balance out the odds a bit more, with the ants pulling off a victory that showed a surprisingly cunning side to the little party addicts; here, they found a way of reusing an emptied bottle of Bud in order to gain a reprieve from the toothless jaws of their foe. The ad opens with nary an ant in sight, just the anteater inserting its snout ever deeper down an anthill, only to accidentally suck up the bottle from the adjacent anthill and get it caught around its mouth. As the anteater struggles to free itself, the ants are emboldened enough to stroll into view, armed with a new bottle of Bud Ice to refill the hole. It's noteworthy that two versions of this ad exist, in which the ants celebrate alternately to "Stayin' Alive" by Bee Gees or "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" by McFadden and Whitehead; in either case, the music is key in cluing us in that the ants deliberately set a trap to inconvenience the anteater.
So yes, the Bud ants were a devious bunch, but their aforementioned anti-anteater scheme was arguably nothing more than self-defence. As indicated in either of the accompanying tracks (although more explicitly in the Bee Gees one) it's all about survival. The ants reserved their darkest side for an ad featuring a rare human encroacher, who was guileless enough to wander into the ants' territory with a bottle of Budweiser and thus made himself a viable target for a brutal mugging in which the ants attempted to burn a hole in his head by holding a magnifying glass up to the sun. Doing so no doubt enabled them to unleash a symbolic retribution on behalf of every ant who'd met their end at the hands of bored schoolchildren discovering how they could manipulate the glare of the sun for their own mean-spirited amusement, and claim a little extra Budweiser whilst at it, although from what we have to go on, this particular guy is a total innocent. He certainly
does nothing to harm or threaten the ants within the space of this commercial, making their behaviour a little callous. Compared to the rest of the campaign, this ad does not immediately signpost the presence of the familiar insects - as far as we're concerned, the hiker starts out as our hero, with the ants instead becoming a creeping presence whose malign agenda becomes apparent only gradually. The conclusion of the ad once again has a disco track as its punchline - in this case, "Disco Inferno" by The Trammps - reaffirming that the ants are light-hearted and fun-loving, but then we just saw what they were capable of. The usage of said track - even more so than the tracks featured in the anti-anteater spot - makes it plain that these ants have rather a twisted sense of humor. They probably are the types to turn away a starving grasshopper, too.
Should we interpret the above scenario as the precursor to a prospective ant reckoning against humanity, and pillaging of its beer supplies? Possibly, although their subsequent manoeuvres against humans bearing Bud have been markedly more modest. One of the Chinese ads showed the ants setting up a trap for an approaching cyclist carrying a crate of Budweiser bottles by laying a rock in the road, but it transpired that all they were looking to do was to create enough turbulence to jar a single bottle of Bud loose - not trip up the cyclist and cause them to break several bones as part of their mugging procedure (as I'd fully expected to be the outcome). They're fiendishly ingenious, but seemingly quite happy to settle for meagre pickings.
EDIT: Actually, I retract the above observation, having stumbled across this ad from the Philippines. Flipping heck, these ants. Not only do they love fun, they'll kill for it.
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