The Wella Gorilla might have gotten up to some fairly crazy shenanigans, but even his nightly schedule of abducting unresponsive humans from their apartment windows and taking them on hair-raising joyrides looks mighty sedate compared to the monkey business that went on in the YoGo universe. Meet YoGorilla, the star of a popular advertising campaign that graced Australian screens in the 1990s and 2000s. Its chief purpose was to incite cravings for the brand of chocolate-flavoured yoghurt/custard product that served as the underlying source of narrative tension in all of YoGorilla's adventures. But the creative minds at the helm were evidentially just as preoccupied with skewering the bombast of contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, which they accomplished with even more precision than those clips Jay Sherman would have the pleasure of roasting every week within The Critic. Speed, Cliffhanger, the Planet Hollywood restaurant franchise - absolutely no prisoners were taken in the ongoing struggle for dessert dominance.
YoGorilla was voiced by Paul Johnstone and, much like the product he was hawking, was an outlandish hybrid concoction, being part Bruce Willis, part Arnold Schwarzenegger and part Sylvester Stallone. He was basically your typical 1990s action hero - brawny, intrepid and with a penchant for causing as much destruction as he set out to rein in. Accompanying YoGorilla on his escapades was his sidekick Snake, a yellow serpent of extremely few words (there is at least one ad where Snake talks - the one where YoGorilla tries his hand at stand-up comedy - which isn't treated with as much in-universe shock as you might imagine). He also had a recurring love interest, whose name I was never able to catch, but I think she's a lion (she has a mane, so make of that what you will) and a recurring nemesis, canine terrorist Hans Doberman (a presumable nod to Hans Gruber, the character played by Alan Rickman in the original Die Hard). There were various other faces that kept popping up within the community, the most prominent being Gordon Gecko, a green lizard modelled after Michael Douglas's character in the movie Wall Street. His shtick involved barking at his unseen associate Barry through his chunky 90s cellphone and watching aghast as his mode of transport was invariably made collateral in YoGorilla's unrelenting efforts to keep the local YoGo supplies from falling into Hans' nefarious paws (Hans' clear palate for the chocolate-based pudding is bothersome, given that he's a dog and such foods are therefore poison to him). There were also a trio of identical looking critters with fluffy white tops who appear in various bit parts throughout the series, and I draw a complete blank on what species they're supposed to be (Albino lions? Poodles? Polar bears?). The YoGo universe was nothing if not alive, and densely populated with figures all fated to collide with one another in a chaotic hodgepodge of dizzying action.
Really, I'm not sure if mere words can do justice to just how head-spinningly frenetic the results were, or just how ambitiously jam-packed each individual ad was with wall-to-wall gags. To experience a YoGorilla ad is to become immersed in a world with absurdity ricocheting from all directions. There's definitely something in there of the madcap, anything-goes humor of the Airplane! movies (making it appropriate that Otto the inflatable pilot even cameos in one of the ads). The gags are so off the wall, and come at you so thick and fast that you'll barely have time to process what's going before you're hit by another. Some of the ads were able to build up quite extensive narratives, and I believe it was common practice to break the longer ones up into two or three chunks, with overblown cliffhanger sign-offs imploring you to stay tuned for the next installment.
Of all the YoGorilla adventures, the entry that sticks out the most as a bona fide classic would be the Speed homage. This is in spite of the fact that Hans Doberman is conspicuously absent. It's never explained if he's responsible for putting that bomb on the bus; nevertheless, there is a bomb on the bus, and YoGorilla takes it upon himself to assert control of the situation, by forcibly boarding and yelling the bad news directly into in the bus driver's ear. The bus driver is yet another character whose exact species is indiscernible to me (facially he looks somewhat like a Chihuahua, but I'm not sure). His immediate reaction is to bail out by throwing himself out of the bus window; he's followed by a couple of sheep, in a gag that I'm not convinced has any deeper significance than to play into the idea of sheep as followers, but is a perfect example of just how delightfully, weirdly random the gags in this series could get. And it gets zanier still. Snake, who's sporting a wig in this ad, is tasked with filling in for Sandra Bullock, while the passengers manage to keep their cool by bonding over their shared love of YoGo products (YoGo GorillaMix, according to the labels). We get an appearance from Crocodile Dundee, with the twist that he's played by an actual crocodile, getting emotionally intimate with a beatnik hippo (a hip hippo?). There's also something going on between a parrot with a vanilla tub and a giraffe, but I've no idea what - for the life of me, I've never been able to pick out what the giraffe actually says after "Is that vanilla?" Honestly, he sounds drunk. Gordon Gecko makes his obligatory cameo, and the albino trio show up, attempting to earn two bob in exchange for wiping the speeding bus's windscreen. The whole thing is a non-stop parade of fast edits displaying the action from all angles, and intense close-ups of these grotesque claymation critters with their perpetually-popping eyeballs; it not only replicates the dynamism of an action blockbuster, but it frequently threatens to push the ad into borderline nightmare territory. The experience culminates in an explosive (quite literally) ending where they eventually stop the bus, quite forgetting about their bomb dilemma. The entailing visual is extreme, but the damage to the passengers and their YoGo seemingly quite minimal.
The second most notable ad in the YoGorilla campaign involves the yoghurt-hungry ape finding himself up against an extra terrestrial who looks something like the aliens from Mars Attacks! and has devious plans for Earth's YoGo supply. This one gets special mention for incorporating a scene where YoGorilla receives a call from then-President Bill Clinton (in the form of a rhinoceros), in which there is a surprisingly risqué reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Of course. What food product doesn't want to have itself stand out by equating itself with presidential semen?
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