The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #43: Beware The Penguins (Bud Ice)

 (Many thanks to Bryan Bierman for bringing this series to my attention.)

I think it's fair to say that there's nothing really overtly threatening about penguins. They may be one of the most universally beloved creatures in existence, and it's not hard to see why. Nature has produced few specimens that rival them in looking quite so cuddly and irresistibly plush toy-ready. As a bonus, their flightlessness, long, slender flippers and waddling, upright gait give them a more human appearance than just about anything else the bird kingdom has to offer. And yet, when it comes to representations in popular culture, penguins have a surprising track record for association with villainy. Oh sure, between Happy Feet, Pingu and Mary Poppins, there is no shortage of media out there to take advantage of the more lovable attributes of penguins, yet the number of spheniscids from the dark side is nothing to be sniffed at. We'll start with the obvious example - one of Batman's most prominent enemies is called The Penguin. What's more, in the 1992 film Batman Begins he sent an army of actual penguins with missiles strapped to their backs to destroy Gotham City. Disney were at one point interested in introducing a penguin to their own villainous roster - before their 1977 film The Rescuers became the story of two mice rescuing a kidnapped orphan from a backwoods diamond mine, it was envisioned as the story of two mice rescuing a polar bear from imprisonment at the flippers of a maniacal king penguin (a premise inspired by one of Marjory Sharp's novels, Miss Bianca In The Antarctic, but still, I couldn't imagine anything more characteristically Don Bluth) - but abandoned the idea because they struggled with how to make the quirky-looking bird appear as though it could convincingly cow anything significantly bigger than itself. Wallace and Gromit yielded the answer in their 1993 adventure The Wrong Trousers - turns out, all you had to do was have the penguin carry a gun. Not that Feathers McGraw needed to demonstrate that he was armed in order to exude jeopardy; with his beady eyes, silent demeanour and eerily out of place presence, the character was an almost impossibly masterful marriage of understated terror and knowing absurdity. Elsewhere, the 1980s incarnation of My Little Pony had an arc involving King Charlatan, a penguin tyrant. The penguins of Madagascar feel as though as they probably belong somewhere upon this spectrum, except they weren't really that evil, just alarmingly proficient at getting whatever they wanted (much like Martini from Olive The Other Reindeer). Clearly, there is something about the penguin that makes it a particularly satisfying critter to subvert the presumed cuteness thereof. Maybe their more humanoid qualities can also work against them, giving them a slight uncanniness, or maybe they're just such surreal-looking birds in general that it's difficult to know where to pigeonhole them; they feel like they're bending reality just existing.

Not least of the menacing spheniscids was the penguin who promoted Bud Ice for a window in the late 1990s, quite possibly the only other contender capable of rivalling Feathers McGraw in the eeriness department. Helping the Bud Ice Penguin is that he was specifically a Pygoscelis adeliae, which, thanks to those piercing eyes of theirs, are easily the most uncanny-looking of all the penguin species. Unlike Feathers, he could be perfectly voluble when the circumstances called for it, although in most ads he tended to restrict communication to his calling card of compulsively crooning the opening notes to "Strangers In The Night". Compared to Wallace and Gromit's infamous enemy, we never actually saw the Bud Ice Penguin do anything overtly intimidating. The terror was all implicit, and all in the mind-boggling inexplicability of an adeliae penguin singing. "Dooby dooby doo..." Onomatopoeia has never sounded so heart-stopping.

"Beware The Penguins" belongs to the same category of animal advertising as the Quaker Harvest Squirrels, in that it pivots around a narrative wherein consumption of the specified product will allegedly make you a target for some psychotic critter potentially looking to tear you limb from limb. Whereas the Harvest Squirrels were initially conceived as a sort of tribute to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, before becoming more Gremlins-esque in nature, the Bud Ice Penguin has the distinctive air of a slasher movie villain, albeit one who carries out the worst of his atrocities off-screen - there's something hair-raisingly unearthly about his single-minded penchant for stalking and terrorising Bud Ice drinkers at their most vulnerable.

The ads in the "Beware The Penguins" series were affectionate pastiches of the horror and thriller genres, with two being derived from popular urban legends - the backseat killer and the upstairs caller. In both legends, the victims find themselves pitted against what is presumed be a external menace, only to discover, sometimes too late, that the danger was lurking much closer than they'd anticipated; those same narrative beats are incorporated faithfully here, but with the twist that the threat in question is a singing penguin. The backseat killer ad in particular feels like a fairly straight recreation of the original legend (prior to the penguin reveal), but for the rather uncommon variation of having the would-be victim be a male driver - traditionally, the legend was conceived to reflect the fears of the solitary female traveller, and the bugbear of the benevolent stranger and the prospective assailant being indistinguishable in the dead of night. Making the protagonist male was likely a concession to appeal to more to the campaign's intended demographic (beer conventionally being marketed more toward male drinkers), although the knowing subversion of gender expectations also makes it easier to read the re-enactment as existing in quotation marks from the go, particularly with the hilariously on the nose reveal that the occupants of the pursuing vehicle are an elderly couple (a pretty reliable shorthand for harmlessness - although I would note that, for the Good Samaritans that they were in attempting to warn the protagonist about the malevolent penguin in his backseat, they do just drive off and leave him when he's in the process of abandoning his car). The upstairs caller legend, meanwhile, usually involves a babysitter who has the good sense to ask the police to trace the source of the intrusive telephone calls, whilst being inattentive enough to her allocated duty not to notice that some housebreaker has gotten in and brutally murdered her charges upstairs. It's no so surprise that the penguin-ised take dispenses with the charges altogether - for as sinister as the penguin is, I doubt that Anheuser-Busch want to imply that he murders children - and makes the protagonist a young couple looking to have a quiet night in (although for all intents and purposes, their supply of Bud Ice has taken the place of the children, as the precious resource at the centre of the conflict). Again, there are knowing quotation marks around the enactment of the legend (the exposition-heavy dialogue between the couple, and of course, the catchphrase drop early on, making the identity of the caller immediately obvious to anybody already familiar with the campaign), yet our rapid ascension up the staircase to reveal the guilty party still has a twisted intensity. Not to mention, what are we intended to make of the final scene, with the police attempting to re-establish contact with the couple, who are suddenly nowhere in sight. Did they flee the house or did the Penguin get to them? Either answer feels just as applicable.

Another of the ads was fashioned more along the lines of an espionage thriller, with a protagonist monologuing about how he's been pursued from Buenos Aires to Budapest, before boarding a train and failing to evade the Penguin yet again, the source of their friction being the clandestine bottle of Bud Ice he has stashed away in his luggage. The Penguin also appeared as the leader of a tribe of natives who'd cornered a team of explorers in the deep dark jungles (again, it was their choice of recreational beverage that made them targets), and in another ad broadening his mugging skills to make off with the Stanley Cup. The little terror certainly got around. Although his nefarious antics proved popular with viewers, the campaign was not without its share of controversy - Budweiser had been running animal-based campaigns for some years by this stage, whether involving frogs or dogs or horses, so they must have been prepared for the usual charges of attempting to appeal to underage drinkers, although in the Penguin's case there was additional contention involving a sports apparel company, Supreme International, who filed a lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch for what they saw as infringement on their own penguin trademark.

Inevitably, we find ourselves circling back to that most important of questions - why a penguin? Obviously, the "Ice" aspect of the brand name makes a penguin a pertinent fit, but why should such a small and ostensibly unthreatening bird, even with those piercing adelaie eyes of his, prove such a persuasive source of menace? Part of the joke is that the in-universe terror he provokes among prospective victims is blatantly over the top, and yet there is something genuinely unsettling about it. It's never exactly obvious what this little penguin is going to do to any of the Bud Ice patrons he meets, but I'm sold on the implication that you don't want to stick around and find out. I would argue that the Bud Ice Penguin succeeds on much the same principle as Feathers McGraw - that the notion of this sociopathic penguin tacitly conspiring against everything around him is so flagrantly absurd, so blatantly out of line with the conceivable order of things that it's spooky. Like The Wrong Trousers, the ads become exercises in how efficiently their creators can tread the line between flat-out silliness and a surrealist nightmare.

The most terrifying thing about the Bud Ice Penguin, though? It isn't actually clear just how many of him there are. Up until now I have been referring to a single Bud Ice Penguin, because to my knowledge we were only ever shown one penguin on screen, and in one of the ads we hear the announcement that "the Bud Ice Penguin has been captured", which would appear to confirm that the pint-sized menace operates alone. But this is curiously at odds with the campaign's slogan, which clearly cautions us to "Beware The Penguins", implying that there could potentially be a whole army of singing, backseat slashing adelaies out there, to the point that we can't even be certain that we're always seeing the same penguin in every ad. So what's the solution? You might want to keep a leopard seal in the trunk of your car for real emergencies, for a start.