The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #11: Madness Maggots (Guinness)

If you found the whole idea of a man who dreams of being a squirrel (or a squirrel who dreams of being a man) to be a little out there, then try this one for size: a bunch of humans on vacation who dream about being maggots (or maggots who dream about being human). A few years prior to our induction into the surrealist delights of Dream Club, Guinness took us on an equally mind-bending excursion which incorporated many of the same themes (among them, humankind's obliviousness to the futility of its own existence), albeit with a darker twist. The matter of The Big Question, The Meaning of Life, is once again evoked amid a slew of confusing sights and bizarrely-placed animal imagery, leading us to a downright incongruous and unsettling conclusion. If the protagonist of "Dream Club" had peered through his peep hole and seen this scenario on the other side, I'm not convinced that laughter would have been his immediate reaction.

"Fishing" was one of the early installments in Ogilvy and Mather's "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense" campaign from 1996, a series of ads designed to boost the brand's standing among young adults by emphasising the odd and unexpected. The sixty-second spot consists of numerous images showing hyperactive humans engaged in a variety of leisure pursuits - sunbathing, ballroom dancing and golfing - which are intermittently contrasted with images of maggots squirming away in a gigantic writhing mass. In the final moments, the ad takes an unexpectedly peaceful turn, switching to the silhouette of a lone angler perched stoically beside a lake. We cut once again to the maggots, revealed to be the contents of the angler's bait box. The stinger being that all of humanity are just maggots in a bucket, waiting to be sacrificed in God's great fishing expedition? Have I got this one right?

In the absence of narration, our vital indicator in making sense of this baffling succession of images is in the closing quotation from the poet Spike Milligan: "Fishing is complete and utter madness." Obviously, there's tremendous irony in how the madcap frenzy of those earlier sequences compares to the Zen-like mindfulness of angler, the calming splendour of the natural world against the cartoon-like artificiality of the preceding environs. So what makes the angler the madman of the equation? Is it a simple matter of his non-conformity, a solitary figure far-removed from the masses who have flocked to those gruesomely overcrowded beaches and golf courses? The only conspicuous hint of "madness" in the final sequence occurs in the momentary shot of the maggots, a jarring callback to the franticness of the preceding images. As such, it seems reasonable to suppose that the answer should lie with the ad's animal element. Namely, it's not the angler who's mad but the maggots. And the maggot people.

On the whole, maggots are not a critter that tend to feature often in advertising, much less for any kind of edible product, given their association with death and decay (it's a gruesome job but somebody's got to do it). Viewers would generally agree that, as a species, they rather lack the majesty of horses and the appealing quirkiness of squirrels. Their continual presence throughout the ad is clearly intended to make us every bit as squirmy, a means of magnifying the grotesqueness of the human activity on display. The advert's method of repeatedly juxtaposing the frantic movements of the leisure-seeking humans with the grisliness of the maggots has the effect of making the angler, shown predominantly in silhouette form, seem all the more graceful and god-like by comparison, but it is also intended to create a disturbing connection between the humans in the earlier sequences and the the maggots glimpsed toward the end, suggesting that the real madness is lurking right beneath the surface of this apparent tranquility. After all, the maggots do not exactly have a positive fate ahead of them, and their constant squirming does little to avert this. I guess this is where God's great fishing expedition comes in. The hectic aimlessness of the humans' own pursuits is reflected in the queasy, congested writhing of the maggots, giving us the impression of two worlds that are equally oblivious and powerless in the greater scheme, and whose only recourse, in both cases, is to wriggle itself senseless. So eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow you're on the hook.

Shit That Scared Matt Groening: An Introduction

If you can get hold of a copy of Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror Issue 1 (originally published in September 1995) you'll find an intriguing Bongo Beat article written by Simpsons creator Matt Groening entitled "49 Things That Frightened and Disturbed Me When I was a Kid" (note: in the UK this article was published in Issue 33 of The Simpsons Comic in November 1999). Here, Matt takes us on a journey down the deep dark well of childhood fear and the various brushes with terror which kept him lying awake in a cold sweat for many a night throughout his youth. Irrational childhood fear can play a major role in shaping one's adult affinities and preoccupations, so this glimpse into the younger Matt's psyche is fascinating in terms of how we plainly see a few themes that would be prevalent in his later work taking form here - for example, Matt brings up his morbid childhood phobia of robots, a few remnants of which were manifestly transferred over into Bender's character in Futurama. What makes it such an entertaining read, however, is the sheer banality of it all, or rather the manner in which Matt's young, impressionable eyes were able to transform the dull suburban world of mid-century America into the stuff of nightmares. Matt's fears were informed by everything from science fiction B pictures to mundane black and white television, from a kid's eye understanding of the politics of the age (Matt feared commies, but for slightly different reasons to the rest of the US) to the freakier happenings (ostensibly, anyway) within his own neighbourhood and his early encounters with the grislier side of nature, among them his first youthful awakenings to the prevalence of mortality and decay. Nowhere is that expressed more succinctly in Matt's list than in item 24, where he supplies an anecdote about opening up a candy bar to find that a bunch of maggots had gotten there first.

Where this list struck a particularly strong a chord with me on a personal level, however, was at item 26:

"26. Uproarious canned laughter on old TV sitcoms."

MY SOULMATE!

Actually, Matt and I have more in common besides our mutual irrational fear of disembodied laughter. Reading through Matt's list, I notice a very clear pattern, whereby growing up Matt was regularly tormented by an older brother named Mark who evidently enjoyed playing on his anxieties.* Well, snap.

I'm such a great fan of Matt's list that I got to thinking that there was perhaps an entire blog series to be mined from going in search of a selection of these objects of terror and giving my own thoughts and impressions on them and their lingering ability to frighten and disturb. There are of course limits to how many of the items on the list I can revisit for myself. The ones relating to Matt's personal first-hand childhood experiences are obviously impractical - I cannot, for example, check out the rotting beaver carcass Matt stumbled on out in the woods one day when he was nine, and nor would I wish to. But the items relating to popular culture (which make up about half the list) are things that I can certainly take a stab at.

As an endnote, the final item on Matt's list acts the punchline to the entire article, namely, "The realization that most of these memories still haunt me." Which is another thing that makes Matt a man after my own heart. I didn't get over a huge chunk of my own irrational childhood fears so much as log them away quietly at the back of my psyche, enabling them to intermittently surface and give my adult brain a good rattling. Which accounts for a significant proportion of the material that I write within these pages.

* Actually, Matt's older brother Mark comes up three times in the list and there's only one instance where he appears to have been deliberately stoking his younger sibling's fears. I'm pretty certain that there's also a Futurama commentary where Matt talks about his brother Mark looking to terrify him by dressing up as a robot, however.

Logo Case Study: Carlton Screen Advertising (Flaming Carlton Star)

These days I often find myself remarking that advertising is a dead art. Which is obviously enormously hyperbolic of me, but it is the case that a lot of contemporary advertising just doesn't capture my imagination the way it used to. In part, I would argue that this is because we're living in the age of the touchy-feely ad (for which we can thank the root of all syrup-slathered evil, John Lewis), and I do not, in general, care for touchy-feely ads. But I do also have to acknowledge that, yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that the advertising era that made the greatest impression on me was the mid-90s through to the mid-00s, back when I was in the process of coming of age. Of course the ads of the 2020s aren't going to have quite the same magic as they had back then. I became an old fogey, and the world in general lost a wad of its lustre. I'm sure that, in 1996, some codger was shaking their head and muttering about how advertising was so much more epic when they were using iguanas to sell cigarettes, and not maggots to sell booze. All I know is that, once upon a time, watching the ad reel before a movie used to be an integral part of the cinemagoing experience for me. Remember that shrill woman in the car in those cinema sponsorship bumpers (from Volkswagen?) who used to yell out, "We're gonna miss the ads, that's the best bit!"? Clearly you were intended to sympathise more with her husband (who, IIRC, got out and abandoned her with the vehicle in motion in the final bumper) but I privately felt she spoke a lot of truth. Going to the movies and seeing the ad reel was like getting a grab bag of bonus miniature stories before the main feature, some weird, some terrifying, some absolutely baffling. I'd sometimes emerge chewing more upon that advertising than the film itself. But now, while I remain a staunch proponent of the theatrical experience, I often find my feet dragging in the foyer as the ads are about to start. To me, they're no longer an indispensable part of the package, but these annoying things you have to suffer through before the real fun begins - sentiments that I fear are inevitable around the onset of middle age. I'd be curious to know if kids today still get spooked by theatrical ads. Anything can seem scarier when it's magnified and in the dark, and you're susceptible enough to the sensory overload - how else can I explain being so deeply unsettled by an ad about a Lloyds cashpoint that played before Free Willy? Even some seasonal John Lewis drivel that's bending over backwards to give you the synthetic fuzzies might seem utterly horrifying when viewed through the right pair of eyes. All the same, I'd contend that a major reason why cinema ads seemed so much more spectacular in my favoured period had a lot to do with the company they kept back then, when the promos of the advertising companies themselves were epic little serotonin-inducers in their own right. As long as Pearl & Dean keep using Pete Moore's "Asteroid" as their jingle, a sliver of that grandeur may be preserved for future generations. But we've yet to find a worthy successor to Carlton Screen Advertising and their flaming Carlton star, which was as singularly commanding a cinematic visual as they come. Nothing said "You will fucking pay attention to what we're selling!" quite like having a red hot iron shoved in your face. Those were the days alright!

What made the Carlton Star so special? For a start, I can't claim that any other logo enticed me into to role-playing that I'm a criminal in olden times who's been sentenced to branding. That may sound like a strangely masochistic reaction, but I'm not sure what other narrative I was expected to attach to the sequence in question. We see a star-shaped iron being dunked into burning coals, then before you know it the thing's upon you. I can only speculate what infraction could warrant the barbaric penalty of having a star-shaped scar singed onto my face, but Carlton inflicted it on me with every trip to Cineworld. What exactly was the symbolism there? Were creators Lambie-Nairn seeking to convey some sly commentary on how advertising seeks to imprint on and commandeer our psyches? Was it deliberately likening the process to an act of brutal assault, implying that, by violently searing its mark upon us (or at least, giving the impression of doing so) it was laying claim to us, and to the impulses and desires that could be molded to make perfectly obedient consumers of us? This implicit message, whether conscious or not, is echoed in the logo's stinger, which arrived at the end of the ad reel to give the star the final word. This add-on was less dramatic than the main ident, showing only the star-shaped brand still pointed at the screen in a visibly cooler state, but (thanks in no small way to the eerie background drones), felt no less threatening. This was my final ominous reminder, as a branded medieval criminal, that the pain from my punitive burns might eventually lessen, but the mark wasn't going anywhere. The star insisted on lingering. I belonged to it now.

Needless to say, the Carlton Star left a terrifying impression on the fleets of kids who'd trekked innocently to their local UCI to see Pokémon: The First Movie. By the time it started showing up, in the late 1990s, I personally was already old enough and had spent enough of that time hanging out in cinemas to have acquired a taste for their little terrors, so the star was all catnip to me. It worked so well because it was so purely cinematic, assaulting the senses in the way that only the big screen can. It was bold, intense and awe-inspiring, kick-starting our presentation with a full-on demonstration of all that cinema can do; you'd come because you wanted an experience that can only be fully understood on an enlarged canvas, and you got that in spades with this thing. The mere sight of that brand entering those red hot embers was enough to get sweat trickling down your brow. Those burning coals felt so real and so tangible that they might as well have rolled off and set fire to the cinema curtains that were drawing back right as the logo was starting. You could practically smell them. It touched on a whole cavalcade of nerves (the primal fear of fire, the uncanny uncertainty in not seeing who was controlling the iron brand, which might as well be moving by itself, the visual and sonic severity of that climactic sizzle) but that's what made it such a perfect appetite whetter for the journey ahead. When the lights go down, you want to feel a little unsafe,  already on the edge of your seat in anticipation for where the experience could potentially take you. As a counterpoint to its aggressive intensity, it's also a stunningly beautiful logo. That final blend of showering yellows and swirling oranges never fails to make me gasp.

The Carlton Star enjoyed a healthy run, turning up the heat for UK cinemagoers until well into the 2000s. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the light finally burned out in in 2008, when the UK operation of Carlton Screen Advertising was acquired by Odeon and Cineworld and rebranded as Digital Cinema Media. The Carlton Screen brand (and the star) remained active in Ireland until 2014, when Wide Eye Media (now Pearl & Dean Ireland) took its place. With the Carlton brand now obsolete on both sides of the Irish Sea, it's unlikely that the Carlton brand will be making a comeback any time soon. But like I say, once marked by its searing intensity, there was no way you were getting its imprint off you. Those of us who grew up with the logo will always bear the star-shaped scar somewhere upon our souls.

The logo had another curious legacy (of sorts), in that it was the seeming inspiration behind a 2002 campaign about how piracy would destroy us all. Was it as petrifying as the real deal? All will be revealed in time.

The World's Most Horrifying Advertising Animals #10: Dream Club Squirrels (Guinness)

There came a time, around the mid to late 1990s, when Guinness, Ireland's favourite brand of draught stout, decided to get weirdly arty with their UK advertising, generating a slew of TV ads that ranged from the strangely beautiful to the flat-out nightmarish (often at the same time). What with all the human maggots squirming around your holiday camps, the tigers menacing your chicken coops and the fishes making off with your bicycles, it was a confusing time to be alive and to be tuning into Frasier. This assortment of surreal delights had its genesis in the desire to make the brand more appealing to younger adults, who were largely dismissing the stout as the drink of their parents' generation. (Guinness weren't the only brand to have such an epiphany at around this time and to traverse the WTF route in the hopes of perplexing the younger demographic into submission - Levi's jeans tried their hand at being purposely odd and confusing across the summer of 98, with some freakishly misguided results.)

The first phase of this new, mind-bending look for Guinness was the "Not Everything in Black and White Makes Sense" campaign, developed by Ogilvy & Mather in 1996, a series of ads filmed in black and white that used surreal and unnerving imagery in order to confront the viewer with the unexpected. The most famous ad of the "Black and White" campaign is, ironically, the one that never aired. Entitled "Men and Women Shouldn't Live Together" (based on a quote by actress Diana Dors), it offered a cunning play on gender archetypes, chronicling the morning routine of a slovenly young businessman, and his fastidious partner's never-ending endeavors to clean up around him, revealing only in the closing moments that the two are a gay couple. Although the ad seems ridiculously innocuous by contemporary standards, the 90s were a vastly different world, and LGBT issues were still regarded as taboo by a lot of the mainstream media. For an ad like this to have run in 1996 would have been radical as hell (one man even gives the other an affectionate peck on the cheek, making it plain that they are indeed lovers and not just housemates), and Guinness proved that they were simply not that cutting edge, losing their nerve and ultimately declining to air the ad (leaving the gate wide open for Impulse deodorant to claim the first depiction of a gay couple in a mainstream British advert two years later, with the ad "Chance Encounter").

Next up was the "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait" campaign by Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, which many would argue peaked in 1999 with "Surfer", an ad likening the extended amount of time it takes to pour a pint of Guinness from the tap (119.5 seconds, according to "Swimblack", an earlier ad from the same campaign) to a surfer waiting on a beach in Hawaii in anticipation of that perfect wave. With its mix of dazzling visuals (inspired by the painting "Neptune's Horses" by Walter Crane, the waves manifested as a fleet of galloping white horses) and a poetic, strangely haunting narration from Louis Mellis, "Surfer" achieved enormous acclaim and was voted the greatest television ad of all time in a poll conducted by Channel 4 and The Sunday Times in 2002 (of course, Channel  did a lot of these "100 Greatest" polls throughout the decade and they tended to be much the same mixture of flavours of the month and 1970s nostalgia). By comparison, campaign's final installment, "Dream Club", which centred around a crowd of bar patrons waiting for an ambitiously visionary dreamer to wake up with his latest epiphany, was a relative flop, generating little interest and failing to significantly boost Guinness sales figures during its run in the spring of 2001. Both ads were directed by Jonathan Glazer (who went on to direct the 2013 feature film Under The Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson) and were concocted from relatively similar ingredients - "Dream Club" adhered to the brand's then-cemented fetish for black and white oddities, using the same combination of uncanny animal imagery and gravelly narration that made "Surfer" such a runaway smash. And yet the two ads arrive at what seem like polar opposite conclusions. One ad celebrates life's endeavours, championing the fortitude of those who are willing to pursue their dreams and rise to the challenge of the elements, while the other ends with its protagonist laughing derisively at the very futility of human existence. One is positively stirring, the other is almost deliberately alienating.

On that note, there's little mystery to me as to why "Dream Club" resonated with the public so poorly compared to "Surfer". "Surfer" is a perfectly paced adrenaline-builder that pours its all into promoting empathy with its protagonist, so that the viewer feels as if they too are being transported into those tumultuous waves along with him. Whereas the 1999 ad handles its central concept with a heady degree of gravitas, "Dream Club" is considerably lighter and wackier in tone. And while the visual centrepiece of "Surfer" - those prancing aqua ponies - provides a powerful metaphor for the hero's struggle in battling the forces of nature, the animal element in "Dream Club" - a tavern of stout-swigging sciurines - plays like a bizarre non-sequitur, a throwaway interlude that has no bearing on the ad's final pay-off. Vexing and irreverent, "Dream Club" is an easy ad to dismiss as a lot of madcap visual weirdness with no deeper substance behind the confusion and technical spice. And yet, it is an ad about a man who dreams of being a squirrel. Or a squirrel who dreams of being a man. One of the two. And ultimately, that's too wickedly, deliciously absurdist for me to ignore. Hence, I'm compelled to go the unpopular route and bat for "Dream Club" as being, if not the objectively better of the two, then certainly the more fascinating and inventive, and meriting leagues more admiration than it received at the dawn of the 00s. And perhaps there's a charm and a flair in its unapologetic zaniness. If "Surfer" ever struck you as being a tad too self-important, then "Dream Club" should be right up your alley.

The hero of "Dream Club", our narrator informs us, is in the business of seeking answers to the questions of fellow bar patrons by embarking on metaphysical adventures in his dreams. Tonight, he has been taxed with "The Big Question" - that most quintessential of all absurdities, The Meaning of Life. Actually, I'm not convinced that this aspect of the ad wasn't also a factor in why "Dream Club" failed to resonate with viewers - despite the all-out weirdness-baiting of the premise, there's an air of predictability in how it will ultimately play out. We're already savvy enough to know that whatever our hero glimpses through the hole in the wall will not be revealed to us. Meaning of Life gags where the answer is obscured or ridiculously mundane were already old hat by 2001 - obviously, Douglas Adams wrote the ultimate example of such a gag in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and everything since has been little more than an ersatz variation on that. The closing punchline of "Dream Club" is not, at first glance, a remarkably innovative one. In the end, I look to those eerily non-sequitur squirrels to provide clues as to the real takeaway for this ad.

The anthropomorphic squirrels of "Dream Club" are its single greatest puzzle. Their inclusion in the ad might strike one as being just a little too random, until you notice that they feature in the backdrop of the regular bar scenes as static taxidermy jobs. The moment in which the hero slips into unconsciousness beside a pint of Guinness, only for his squirrel counterpart to appear and to fly suddenly into consciousness, comes as a startling interruption that threatens to off-set our perception of the ad entirely. This most unexpected of turns could easily have provided the punchline in itself, only the protagonist's quest immediately resumes and leads to a climactic struggle as he is tasked with ascending a mountain made up of frantic human bodies, a set-piece that I assume was devised in order to replicate some of the cinematic qualities of "Surfer". The squirrel interlude introduces a curious paradox, whereby the central squirrel reels in horror at having experienced, by way of his own dreams, the absurdity that is being human, while also holding up a borderline grotesque mirror to the behaviour of the humans with his distinctly anthropomorphic stout-swigging. We see ourselves in a squirrel who is visibly shaken at having just seen himself at us, and who expresses his rejection using recognisably human traits. Despite these ludicrous contradictions, the squirrel represents a fleeting moment of clarity and awakening, before the human narrative starts up once again and we are lost amid the sheer chaos of the sea frantic souls clamouring for an answer to a question that most likely doesn't have one. If our tendency to fixate on such self-imposed absurdities as The Meaning of Life is what makes us human, then we are a ridiculous species indeed, as is suggested elsewhere in the ad with the image of a horse rolling on its back as if laughing uproariously at the futility of the humans' endeavours.

"Dream Club" concludes with our hero making it to the top of the pile, peering through the hole and erupting with fits of laughter. Because of course, life is a tremendous joke with a punchline that is perpetually hidden from its participants. Yet the final image is unsettling - we see legions of people gathered outside the bar in stony-faced silence, waiting passively for an answer to this eternal head-scratcher while the hero effectively laughs at their expense. They wind up the butt of a gag that they have no means of comprehending. Unlike "Surfer", which concluded with the viewer sharing in the hero's moment of triumph, "Dream Club" ends with the viewer being exiled out into the cold with the other unenlightened onlookers; despite the slogan's assurances that "Good Things Come To Those Who Wait", we exit the ad none the wiser. The ad's closing line, "Welcome To Dream Land", uttered just as we are expelled into the streets outside, would imply that this is where the actual dreaming takes place, only in place of madcap visual zaniness, we simply get a sea of expressionless inertia, the futility of holding out in vain for an answer that will most assuredly not be coming.