Friday, June 15, 2012

KFC invites us to pick our poison



As near as I can tell, this commercial features a grandfather and grandson who are perfectly willing to hurt each other in order to get the side dish they want to choke down alongside the Kentucky FRIED Chicken they expect to eat that night (I get the vibe that this is KFC Night for the family.  Which means eating fatty, life-shortening sludge is a regular event for these guys.)

Because it's TV, these idiots naturally live in a massive suburban palace, with 20-foot ceilings, which looks like it's regularly maintained by a six-person cleaning crew.  There's something Beverly Hillbilly-ish about seeing these tasteless jerks wrestle in the living room of a gleaming multi-million dollar castle, don't you think?  I get the feeling that if the commercial had continued another ten seconds, we would have seen this family using pool cues to pass pots of possum gravy around the billiard table.

All this "funny" angst is over whether the Free Side included with the overflowing bucket of chicken parts (which is Magic, in that the number of pieces in the bucket never goes down, no matter how many people we see eating this junk.)  Kid wants Mac' n Cheese.  Grampa wants mashed potatoes and gravy.  Billy Bob Thornton wants french fried potatoes with mustard-- oh, sorry, I'm thinking of something else.  Thornton doesn't actually make an appearance in this ad.  Good for him.

The "punchline" is that Stupid Kid and Fat Slob Grampa both get exactly what they want, because when you buy a bucket of KFC Dismembered Chicken, you get two free sides.  That's a good thing, because obviously the family living in this mansion can't possibly afford to spring for an extra side dish.  Whatever.

Here's what I really don't get- in the final scene, we see a bowl of green beans on the table.  Two quick questions-

1.  Since you get two free sides, and potatoes and mac 'n cheese are the two that were chosen, did the Mom and Dad who picked up the...err...."food" always include green beans with their order?  So they get a huge bucket of chicken, a side order of green beans- and then let either their male kid or Grampa pick the other side?  What kind of weird Control Issues do mom and dad have, anyway?

2.  Do people really order green beans with their bucket of oil-infused bird parts?  If so, isn't this kind of like ordering a Diet Pepsi to wash down your Buy One Get One Free Double-Down Sandwiches?   I mean, what's the point?  Who the hell do you think you are kidding, people?  Like the fat in the chicken isn't going to take one look at the limp nutritional value of the beans and laugh itself- and you- to death.


3 comments:

  1. I vaguely remember KFC once had Foghorn Leghorn as a spokestoon. The idea of having a cartoon chicken talk about eating this sort of sludge used to make me think "This is clearly an ad for cannibalism"; now it makes me think that he was trying to kill us for eating his brethren.

    ReplyDelete
  2. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/hl-4616836/saturday_night_live_cluckin_chicken_season_18/

    Like this? :>)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. Exactly that. It's as if the adman wanted Foggy to wish that he was in our stomachs instead of in the barnyard trolling Ol'Houndog.

      Delete