You might recall how, some years ago, the public's imagination was momentarily captured by a television campaign in which a drumstick-wielding gorilla was seen to bash out the percussion fill to a certain Phil Collins tune. It didn't have a lot that was conceivably to do with the product being shilled (a bar of chocolate), but it certainly garnered attention. The gorilla in question was alright enough, although if you ask me a little too cute and clean-cut. My TV ad-suffused nightmares are haunted by a very different gorilla - a nocturnal, city-dwelling ape who terrorised the appearance-conscious for a brief spell back in the late 1990s. A gorilla who was weird, wild and had an undisputedly sinister side. This was the gorilla who really deserved to go down in the advertising hall of the fame; the one who came to you when your defences were down and for whom Wella brand gel was required to literally keep out of your hair.
This campaign opened by purporting to answer that most immortal of questions - why does your hair look so bad in the morning? The real answer is that you probably shouldn't be showering right before you go to bed, but that is obviously significantly less fun that what the ad comes up with - specifically, a gorilla who scrambles through your bedroom window every sundown and takes you on one positively mind-bending long night's journey into day. How mind-bending might have depended on which version of the ad you were watching; the basic formula has the gorilla taking hold of the sleeping protagonist, tossing him around his apartment like a rag doll and taking him out for a crazy joyride (for all we know, not even in the protagonist's own car), but the full, uncut version from Germany went a lot more hardcore with the gorilla's hedonistic outbursts. In this version, he goes so far as to extend his middle finger to a couple of innocent bystanders...which sounds, on paper, as though it should make him the funnier depiction, yet the ad counterpoises by centring in on the more menacing implications of having a gorilla invade your personal space while you're at your most unresponsive. This ape is a looming, snorting beast who takes you from your comfy resting place and out into a harsh nocturnal soundscape of blaring horns and sirens. He crawls along your bedsheets like something from a low-rent slasher. All of which gives him the air of a most unsavoury prowler, in the hair-raising business, one assumes, because he's a thug who just gets off on the chaos. Not so with the gorilla from the chopped down version, who starts by resting his face adoringly on the sleeper's shoulder. As he tosses the man around, he lets out a hearty chuckle. This gorilla is doing it because he loves. He loves...yes, he loves messing up your hair, that much is evident. But what he really loves is spending his twilight hours with you, and this bizarre ritual is just his offbeat way of showing it. From his perspective, the two of you had a beautiful thing going, and then you went and allowed that tub of greasy cosmetics to come between you.
The diverging ads are a fine example of just how drastically you can alter the tone of a campaign with a bit of editing and a change of soundtrack - both make witty use of the fever dream absurdity of the scenario, but at notably different pitches. In the shorter version that I was always accustomed to seeing at the time, the gleefully buoyant choice of music not only has the gorilla coming off as more of a mischievous scamp, but pretty much everything in how the ad is put together imbues him with a greater sense of affection for the man whom he ruthlessly pummels every evening. That moment where he fondles his hair one last time before calling it a night is a particularly lovely touch. There's a whole lot of tenderness in this edit. Compare that to his uncut counterpart, who curtly shoves his companion aside during the driving sequence, when the motion of the vehicle momentarily causes his head to rest against his fuzzy gorilla hide. The two apes likewise get their own individual reactions to the appearance of the fatal Wella hair gel, as befits their respective characterisations - the uncut gorilla beats his chest in indignation, presumably intending to get even with his human quarry on another night, while the cut gorilla howls in desperation, horrified that his token of affection has been so thoughtlessly nullified.
The creepiest aspect of the scenario (incorporated into both versions of the ad) is the epilogue implying that the gorilla is constantly monitoring his unwitting plaything, even during the daylight hours. If Wella is proposing that this is why we ALL tend to have bad hair in the morning, then is the implication that we ALL have our own personal gorillas popping in every nightfall to play? It surely can't just be one urban gorilla doing it to everybody with a head of hair all over the glove, or how on earth would he find the time? Or is he supposed to be like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, and can apparently handle calling in on innumerable households in a single night? (Now that I think about it, The Bad Hair Day Gorilla does have a nice ring to it.) The simpler explanation would be that this gorilla is actually a cunning metaphor, for the bestial qualities that lurk within us all. He is the wilder part of yourself that you might not always want to let hang out, the part of you that entices you to do, if not bad, then socially unacceptable things (like strutting around with unkempt hair), here envisioned as a dark shape that creeps into being and manipulates your body while your higher reasoning turns a blind eye (if you're wondering how this guy manages to sleep through the experience of being tossed around by a hulking gorilla, then there's your answer - it's entirely willful on his part). The practicalities of Wella Shockwaves, the ad proposes, are in avoiding making such qualities evident in your diurnal, or public self. Although if the implication is that there was no gorilla and that the damages to our protagonist's hair were all entirely self-inflicted, then I'm not sure it bodes so well for him at the end of the uncut ad, given that I think I hear a police helicopter in hot pursuit. The shorter version is just sweeter all-round, even if that precious playful gorilla does end up getting spurned.
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