Okay people, this is a big one. I recently experienced a "Eureka!" moment that was, on a personal level, utterly tectonic. After much tireless searching, I am finally able to close the book on a television mystery me that's been haunting me for over 30 years. As a young child, I have very distinct and very uneasy memories of being repeatedly exposed to an advertisement that confounded the living daylights out of me - in part because I couldn't make head nor tail of its intended message. By then, I was just about worldly-wise enough to know that the purpose of advertising was to attempt to sell you something, but basically paranoid enough to not put it past the powers that be to throw in random bits of stimuli just to make your sleep at night a lot harder. I had no other means of explaining the existence of this ad, which had no discernible agenda other than to whack you with a weird, confusing and, above all, disturbing scenario entailing the apparent imperilment of a small, fuzzy animal (albeit one obviously played by a puppet). I know I've mentioned it in these pages at least once before, in my review of "Who Shot Mr Burns?: Part One", when trying to explain the personal anxieties I associated with the term "To Be Continued...", so let's just copy and paste the synopsis I gave back then:
"There was a short period, some time in the early 1990s, when the bane of my TV-watching existence was a most peculiar and disturbing TV ad in which stock footage (I presume) of an enormous truck hurtling down a desert highway was interspliced with the cries of a terrified critter, apparently in the path of the truck and in danger of being crushed by it. The creature itself was of no discernable species - the most we ever saw of it was its huge plastic eyes rolling open and shut as it stood there, seemingly powerless to alter its fate. Then, the action came to an abrupt halt, the words "To be continued..." were flashed across the screen in big bold letters, aaaaand I never did figure out what that was all about. As far as I'm aware, the scenario never was continued, and maybe that was the joke in itself, but it was never apparent to me what the advertisement was actually selling, and it's haunted me ever since. If you're wondering why you've never seen this featured as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, it's because I've never been able to find it. Not having a clue what the campaign in question was for has seriously impeded the whole search process. I would love to put the matter to rest once and for all, because as things are, that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching."
I was never quite able to shake the psychological baggage the experience left with me. A barrage of questions lingered. Did the ad actually make good on its threat of continuation? Did the animal in question escape being crushed beneath the wheels of that hulking great truck? Was the animal a species or character I was intended to recognise? What the hell was that advertisement trying to sell me? As I entered adulthood and the bewilderment persisted, I knew the only way to overcome it was to confront the source head-on and to go in search of my televisual demon. After all, the establishment of YouTube had made it so much simpler to access nostalgic advertising online, if you knew what you were looking for. Problem is, I didn't. After all this time, I couldn't even second-guess what brand the ad had been covertly hawking, which made it very hard for me to narrow down my searches. The best I could do was take a stab at the specific period in which I was likely to have seen it (I knew it was either late 1992 or early 1993 - I could swear I had seen it on CITV around airings of Tiny Toon Adventures, but this was pre-Animaniacs), scout out uploads of adverts from those years and hope for the best. In practice it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. For the longest time, I got zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Which surprised me, because I seem to recall this ad being horribly ubiquitous back in the day. It's a good thing that I'm so enthusiastic about old school advertising in general, so trawling through upload after upload for years on end wasn't a total waste of time. I got to relive plenty of other memories, some fond, some unsettling in their own way. But none quite so prized as the Holy Grail of traumatic advertising, which continued to taunt and elude me, an image too persistent for me to cast it aside, and yet one so elusive it was beginning to feel as though I was the only person on the planet who bore its terrible weight of its memory.
Until a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to find the infernal thing, tucked away in an obscure YouTube upload. Now finally, I have the answers I craved. They weren't necessarily the answers I wanted, mind. I pulled back the lid on this thing and, well, it turns out there's actually a pretty fiendish twist to this story that I was totally unprepared for. At the time, I'd suspected that the whole "To Be Continued" thing was intended as a parody of melodramatic television cliffhangers (this was post-Truckers, which had always ended with Edward Kelsey giving those exact words in his eerie sign-off each week, so I was able to attach some theatrical significance to the term) and that the joke was that the scenario wouldn't be continued. I couldn't logically link that joke to any identifiable product, but I was certain, looking back, that I must have missed a trick - perhaps it was part of a bigger ad and there was another segment I hadn't noticed it had always segued into. But no, the actual answer was far more distressing. I did indicate in the above synopsis that if I were ever to uncover this ad, I would cover it as a Horrifying Advertising Animal, so here we are.
My description of what happened in the ad was fairly accurate, but for a few minor details. The eyes of the fake animal turned out to latex rather than plastic, and they didn't roll open and shut. Instead, they showed the reflection of the approaching vehicle, a detail I clearly didn't absorb at the time. I also couldn't say for certain whether stock footage was used for the visuals of the truck (Maybe? I don't know). I was only majorly wrong about one thing. The onscreen threat that this ominous scenario was "To be continued" was no joke. There WAS a follow-up ad. And this is where it all gets bitterly ironic - it was one that I'd been well-familiar with for all these years. In fact, I'd already covered it in this very series all the way back in 2020, not realising there was ever a connection. I've termed this the 52nd Horrifying Advertising Animal, but that's something of a cheat. This is really a revisit of the 27th.
Remember this guy?
That's right. This flat-out nightmare of an ad, which at the time I had registered as a baffling one-off, transpires to have been a prelude to the equally nightmarish (but marginally more comprehensible, at least from the standpoint of it existing to sell me a product) ad for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, in which Steven O'Donnell fiddles with an unresponsive hedgehog in a fruitless attempt to revive it. It was all a teaser, to account for how the hedgehog got so unresponsive in the first place. The animal seen cowering in terror at the approaching truck was none other than the same hedgehog puppet we later saw with a coroner's tag on its toe and in the questionable care of O'Donnell. The answer was right under my nose all along. I'd just never put it together. Seriously now, was I supposed to? Aside from the fact that they feature the same spaghetti western leitmotif, there's not a lot to overtly connect the two ads. The hedgehog puppet doesn't look amazingly recognisable in its stationary form, and the follow-up doesn't incorporate any flashback material, at least not in any airing that I saw. I surely can't have been the only person confused by this?
Here's a far pettier nitpick about the ad's execution. The vehicle in question is an American-style truck and the footage was visibly filmed in an American desert. It even sounds, to my ears, like the hedgehog is saying "Uh-oh!" with a discernible American accent. Which is all very flawed, because hedgehogs aren't found in the wilds of America (judging by its colouration, this is meant to be a European hedgehog and not an African pygmy hedgehog, which is the kind you can keep as a pet). If you'd asked me to guess what type of animal it was intended to be from the teaser alone, I'd have ventured armadillo. (I'd also remembered the puppet as having more cat-like features, another factor that evidently kept me from connecting the necessary dots.) The hedgehog is also implied, in the follow-up ad, to have ended up in some twisted parallel universe version of St Tiggywinkle Hospital in Aylesbury, UK, so something strange is definitely going on with the campaign's sense of geography. Actually, I'd wager that the truck and the desert highway in the teaser were intended as a homage to the movie Duel - which does have the added effect of making it seem as though the truck is assaulting the hedgehog on purpose, the honk of its horn resonating as a murderous battle cry. The spaghetti western music likewise reinforces the sense of a deliberate showdown between these two blatantly mismatched forces. The poor hedgehog didn't stand a chance.
The upload I have to thank for getting me reacquainted with this childhood nightmare was not one of the random advertising blocks I've been trawling through for years, but an obscure educational VHS titled Sega Invades Your Schoolwork, which was apparently intended to be shown to school kids as a teaching tool on the value of marketing. They included both hedgehog ads, as examples of how Sega's advertising proved that they were better than the competition, and I've now got the answers I've been seeking all these years. As I say, though, they weren't exactly the answers I was hoping for. I refer you back to what I said in my "Who Shot Mr Burns?" review about how "that whole scenario still lies suspended in my head, with no clarity as to the fate of that plastic-eyed critter or what the heck I was even watching." It is undeniably a weight off my mind having closure on the latter (since the question was only going to chew away at my sanity the longer it went unaddressed). With regard to the former, I think I actually preferred living in blissful ignorance. Knowing the scenario didn't end well for the imperilled critter really is a massive bummer. I had always assumed that if the cliffhanger had been picked up again, it would have found some way to escape the incoming vehicle. The heinous truth could only sour my elation in having untangled this longstanding mystery. Do you understand how deflating this is? I located my white whale and it took a big salivary bite out of me.
I'd already considered the chief installment ,with O'Donnell prodding the inert hedgehog, to be disturbing enough on its own merits, but now that I've put the whole narrative together this is easily one of the most singularly, purely horrifying ad campaigns I've personally come across. If I were tasked with picking out the advertising animal I'd rate as the most purely horrifying, I would, without question, go for Kevin the Levi jeans hamster (with the irony that I did not technically cover Kevin as part of the Horrifying Advertising Animal retrospective, since I wrote about him before it occurred to me that I could spin a whole series from the notion - although you can consider him a proto Horrifying Advertising Animal, along with the Coca-Cola swimming elephant and the bizarre menagerie in that Roysters crisp ad). The only detail that makes the Sega campaign slightly more palatable is that, unlike the Levi's ad, which used a live hamster and a stuffed one according to the needs of the story, they never used a real animal at any point. The doomed hedgehog is clearly always a latex imposter (its little lifeless eyes are still enough to rupture your heart, however). But it's still an amazingly grim and mean-spirited premise through which to sell a video game that was, at the end of the day, supposed to be a bit of innocent diversion. For context, it was part of a wider "Sega TV" campaign, which was renowned for taking a weird and edgy approach to hawking the Sega Mega Drive to UK audiences. The release of Ecco The Dolphin, for example, was teased with a faux commercial for "Ecco" washing powder (what, they didn't want to keep the theme going and do a teaser with a dolphin puppet struggling in a tuna net?). On those terms, the sheer WTF-ness of the Sonic campaign at least fits in perfectly with the broader brand. But I do find it a bit astounding that nobody influential enough within Sega's UK arm apparently remarked, "The dead hedgehog? Bloody hell, don't you think that's a bit much?" (as opposed having a giant image of said dead hedgehog plastered across their headquarters at the time of the game's release - I mean, seriously? And they had a miniature Sonic making the peace sign in the corner as if he wouldn't be deeply mortified by this mockery of his species). Sonic The Hedgehog is supposed to be a kid-friendly franchise, after all. Did kids really want to have it sold to them by having a dead hedgehog shoved in their faces? Did adults, for that matter?
I've reflected on it, and I've come to the bleak conclusion that Britain must have gone through a cultural fascination with dead hedgehogs in the 1980s that trickled over into the early 90s. After all, BBC sketch show Not The Nine O'Clock News very notoriously incorporated a sketch where a hedgehog was gruesomely crushed by the wheels of a truck, followed by a faux apology in which they clarified that the hedgehog was stuffed, and then suggested that responsibility for promoting hedgehog abuse ultimately lay with the hedgehog taxidermists, whoever they were. This was such a defining example of NTNON humor that they adopted a dead hedgehog as their go-to mascot and had it brazenly centred on the covers of their LP releases, most memorably between slices of bread and cheese as a hedgehog sandwich (I should emphasise that this was a real hedgehog, in their case, not a puppet). Pictures of dead hedgehogs sold records in the 1980s, apparently. So perhaps it wasn't such a huge leap to suppose they might sell video games too. We can trace this campaign to the release of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 in November 1992; thus, it represented the tail-end of the UK's sordid love affair with hedgehog misfortune. What was coming in 1993, however, was to change zeitgeist forever. The Animals of Farthing Wood was set to take the UK by storm, and it too featured a critical scene in which a couple of hedgehogs were crushed beneath the wheels of a hulking great lorry. On this occasion, the occurrence was presented as a tragedy, a harrowing consequence of humankind's encroachment upon and indifference toward the natural world, and the nation was left collectively traumatised by what they saw. After that, we couldn't go back. To quote Farthing Wood's own Fox, there was nothing to go back for.
Now that I've got my closure on this matter, I can't tell you how eager I am to move on from it. I do need a new advertising white whale, however. How about the cat food ad where the guy eats his cat's food (and loves it), mistaking it for leftover stew his girlfriend prepared? I only remember seeing it once, but you're not going to convince me that I dreamed it.
