The first thing I want to flag up about this entire concept is, doesn't beer kill snails? I'm pretty sure there's a technique used by gardeners that involves baiting and fatally intoxicating them with the stuff. The final image of this ad, which shows Black inside an overturned Guinness glass, filling his snail guts up with stout, is slightly ominous for that reason. The union of booze and mollusc is, nevertheless, one indispensable for the purposes of this ad. The snail is one with the Guinness, because the snail is the Guinness. The snail's name isn't given as Black within the ad itself (if we look closely at the board where all of the odds are written, however, we can pick out that his handler's name is Rey Rojo), and is discernable only from the title, but it tracks with the general theme. He's called Black because Guinness itself is black. And white, and it doesn't make sense. Much like the central scenario in this perky slice of germinal Y2K insanity.
"Bet on Black" was the third ad in Guinness's "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait" campaign, and the first to not be directed by Jonathon Glazer. Instead, this one was helmed by Frank Budgen, whose other advertising credits include "Tag" for Nike, "Escape The Sofa" for Reebok and the infamously traumatising "Cartoon Boy" for the NSPCC. After the all-out arthouse sombreness of "Surfer", "Bet on Black" represented a return to a more familiar formula for the brand - upbeat Latin soundtrack (in this case "Babarabatiri" by Beny More) and little indication that it was taking itself especially seriously. It might be considered more of a direct successor to "Swim Black", in that it also focussed on a local sporting event and the eccentric customs of small communities, although tonally the two scenarios still seem worlds apart. "Swim Black" told a charmingly down to earth story about an ageing professional
swimmer competing in an annual race that, unbeknownst to him, is fixed
in his favour. "Bet on Black", by contrast, is about as far as the "Good Things" campaign went in embracing the dynamics of a full-fledged cartoon. "Dream Club", Glazer's third contribution to the campaign, boasted some fairly baffling imagery involving anthropomorphic squirrels, but with more of a dream logic presentation. "Black" was as knowingly, unashamedly silly as "Good Things" was prepared to get, with the cunning twist that all the silliness follows on from what is an extensive and relatively grounded build-up. What I love about "Black" is that it effectively trolls you as to what the punchline is going to be twice over.
"Black" was shot in (and is, I presume, set in) Cuba, and much like "Swim Black" it opens with a pseudo documentary approach that provides us with a small flavour of the featured community, before dropping us into the heart of the narrative action. We see glimpses of people in their houses and out on the streets, lingering in anticipation, while others set up for the day's big event. That the ad is about snails is hidden from us until about 40 seconds in; it becomes apparent that these people are preparing to race some form of small animal (judging by the size of that track they're laying out, but what they actually have in those cigar boxes is at first a total mystery. The instant our first mollusc appears, the ad is effectively flipped on its head - all of this meticulous build-up for something as out there as snail racing? Well, we have already had our first glimpses of spectators swigging out of Guinness glasses before the snails show up - we know what's being advertised and should have been on our toes. The snail handlers align their respective racers upon the starting line, then everyone seems momentarily flummoxed when the pistol is inspired and the slimy critters yield very little in the way of kinetic action. They still seem to be treating this ridiculous situation as serious business, and the joke appears to be squarely on them. I mean, it's well-known that the garden snail is one of the slowest-moving creatures on Earth (of which Guinness should be all-too aware, given that they keep records on such things). The ad allows us to wallow, for 13 gut-wrenching seconds, in that dead, empty inertia, caught between our expectations of how the world works and the characters' evident assumption that snail-racing should be fast and riveting. It is naturally, a metaphor for the protracted length of time in which it takes a pint of Guinness to pour, where you may think that nothing much is happening, when something truly glorious is gearing up to transpire.
Suddenly, before you can wrap your head around the sheerness wrongness of what you're seeing, those little blighters are off. And boy, can they move. Now, the joke is on us, as we get to grips with the fact that this is an alternate universe that obeys a very different set of rules to our own, one in which snails might actually be some of the fastest creatures on Earth, and these folks know exactly what they are doing. This too is a metaphor for the exhilaration of Guinness consumption, and for the prudence of the Guinness consumer in being willing to endure that extended pour time. The point at which Black glides over the finishing line is where our stout-facilitated exaltation peaks, and where the ad gets particularly fearless in flaunting its absurdity - it has Black do a victory jig with his antenna, before he goes and gets truly plastered in his liquid counterpart, along with his adoring fanbase.
All very daft, but done with more panache than DreamWorks' Turbo, right?
The ad, in its original form, is 100 seconds long, although most advertising blocks naturally went with a 60 second version that moves more hastily through the initial phase of the story - the build-up to the race was shorter, and the inertia point, in which the snails momentarily refuse to budge, was reduced to a paltry six seconds. And you know, mores the pity. Any snips to these snails, and to their handlers, feels like a concession to the reality that folks generally don't have the time or patience to sit through anything with so ambitiously protracted a build-up.
They might, though, have the patience to sit through an actual snail race. This ad makes light of the concept, but it's a real thing. The World Championships are held in Congham every summer.
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