The Mind Boggleth: Zombie Redenbacher and Other Horrors
Sexualcabinetry considers his own mortality while staring deep into the glassy eyed Innsmouth Horror what is Zombie Redenbacher.
Part of the fundamental basics we as a sentient race must understand is that death is a finality we must each endure. There is no way to get around it: death happens to us all, at a one in, one out ratio. Perhaps, then, it is sheer American hubris to apply the names of real people to corporate personhood. After all, Colonel Sanders is dead (of a heart attack, for sheer Hamartian irony), yet there is his grinning, beady eyed little face on every bucket of Original Recipe, staring at us, leering at us, with the mocking teeth of Death himself.
Through the magic of Youtube, we can even see a rare piece of Americana: The Colonel dancing with a time traveling Michael Jackson on the Lawrence Welk show.
Of course, when Colonel Sanders passed on to the great PETA rally in the sky, it was only a matter of time until chicken sales began to drop. Everything was tried. KFC began a number of campaigns during the late 70s thru the early 90s, trying to find an approach that would stick like gravy to the side of a Lil' Bucket.
This somewhat pathetic attempt, which we'll call the "Walt Disney Protocol" (after the odd state of affairs the Disney Corporation found themselves in after Uncle Walt died of a mysterious icepick through the left lung one night after fucking one of the Dumbo Ride hostesses on the Pirates of the Caribbean), goes through several rather bizarre line-items before ultimately arriving at it's conclusion: the finding of a new spokesman, or the resurrection of the old spokesman through the unspeakable arts of necromancy.
STEP ONE: ADORABLE CHILDREN
After your fearless leader has passed on, use adorable children (preferable in groups of even numbers) to promote the image of "generational continuance". You need this image first out of the gate, because it reminds the soulless, gaping maw of consumerism that is your market to recognize that you feel their pain. Sure, your spokesman was bought out by General Mills, his image signed away like so many herbs and spices and forced to attend the opening of every miserable little pigshit fast food outlet from Topeka to San Jose, ultimately forcing his decline into poverty and eventual seclusion in a sanitarium for "mashed potato themed serial killings", but at least you remember that he died so that millions more can live. Like Jesus Christ, Colonel Sanders died for our sins, and we need small children, the ones least likely to die of sodium deposits.
Barring children, you can use puppies, kittens or Kevin Federline, but you're on your own.
STEP TWO: CLAYMATION
When the children have failed, give Will Vinton a call. He'll set you up. Claymation is usually the first step in reconsolidation of spokesmanship: it's vague, it's cheap, and it's ranking pretty high on the "Uncanny Valley" scale. The beauty of this approach is that you can essentially be assured that your spokesman will never die, and in case that isn't safe enough, plasticene is unnatural and doesn't decompose either. The downside?
Claymation is the worst form of animation in the world.
I cannot, cannot stress that fact enough. It's like you're saying "Here's a turd that we moved around and drew faces in! HERE, OUR FOOD IS LIKE THIS." For a company that sells subpar chicken as it is, the image of a claymation chicken being brutally tortured is hardly appetizing, which is why KFC then followed up with the next, less obvious step…
STEP THREE: BELOVED PUBLIC DOMAIN LITERARY CHARACTERS
Yes, let's bring Charles Dickens in on it. While you're at it, throw Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Piggy-Wiggle and Count Dracula and Barry Lyndon and Abraham Lincoln and the Virgin Mary in the mix. When you're at this step, you're desperate. Sales are probably down, and you've got a few food contamination cases pending that are tying up your available marketing options. The best part about using public domain characters is that you can't be sued for using them. The worst part, of course, is that you incur the wrath of people like me who are already suspicious of your incessant need to tell me that your product exists.
The next step, of course, is the penultimate one:
STEP FOUR: BELOVED NON-PUBLIC DOMAIN POP CULTURE CHARACTERS (USUALLY ANTHROPOMORPHIC ANIMALS RELATED TO YOUR PRODUCT IN A CREEPY, CANNIBALISTIC WAY)
Man, I don't know how they let this one fly. This was produced in 1987, and Mel Blanc had a year left to live. The fact that Mel Blanc, the king of cartoons, the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Barney Rubble, even, yes, Twiki (and for you true obscurists out there, let's not forget The Demon of Insincerity) consented to do this is bizarre enough as it is. But let's read into the subtext a bit further... Foghorn Leghorn and his perpetual nemesis, the Chicken Hawk, are in the barnyard. The Chicken Hawk is having difficulty eating the chickens Foghorn Leghorn is supposed to be guarding.
What's Foghorn Leghorn's advice?
GO TO KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN, BECAUSE THEY DO CHICKEN RIGHT.
Imagine the SS have just entered Anne Frank's house, and they're looking for Jews, and the landlady just out and tells them they're behind the wall. That's what Foghorn Leghorn is doing here. "Here, eat the chickens whose eggs I am to inseminate to further perpetuate my seed. Better yet, go to Kentucky Fried Chicken, because theirs are better." Revolting.
STEP FIVE: RE-ANIMATING
Step Five, the one that takes place after all the others have failed, is the worst one of all. When you're at this point, you have nothing left to lose, since you've already tossed your self respect.
Ah, but what does this have to do with Zombie Redenbacher?
I'm just setting you up. It all rolls downhill from here. And, like Homer Simpson, it's going to hit every bump on the way down.
First off, nobody needs popcorn. It isn't exactly healthy, and it's a known diuretic. It will drain the nutrients straight out of your body faster than a vampire on nitrous. Still, it's a part of American life. And, to be honest, it's fairly nondescript. It's kind of a blank slate product. Unlike other snack foods, like Cheetos or Doritoes or Fruity Booty, all popcorn pretty much looks and tastes the same. Orville Redenbacher, theoretically, changed all that with his "gourmet popping corn", which was the darling of the yuppie set in the early 80s until it became somewhat ubiquitous with it's competitor, Pop Secret, hot on Orville's bowtie wearing, hornrimmed glasses bedecked heels.
When Redenbacher passed on, there wasn't too much to separate the brand from their competitors. After all, Jiffy Pop didn't have a Tobias Q. Jiffy to lend an air of wholesome Midwestern eccentricity to their product, did they? After all, if you can't trust a weird man who claims to be from Valparaiso, Indiana (not to be confused with Valparaiso, Brazil), who can you trust?
On a side note, why are there so many wholesome Midwestern eccentrics with these crazy products anyway? What is it about the American Midwest that creates these odd looking lunatics who devote their entire lives to commerce via one dimensionality? Did Orville Redenbacher ever think about waffles? Phillips head screwdrivers? His own impending doom? Is the Midwest truly so uninteresting that people have the luxury of insect-like specialization? What will future societies think of ones such as ours that feed and clothe these freaks?
Perhaps that's the American way of life. The Japanese have television shows where they subject shirtless waifs to firehoses. The Spaniards like to torture gigantic pot roasts. The Antarctic Arcology Nazis have spent their time perfecting a race of atomic super men. Americans like to tinker away at gourmet popping corn. That's just the way it is, the quirks are cultural.
Back to the point at hand, popcorn is such a non-product that it really ultimately doesn't matter what sort of kind you buy. Orville seems to be a good pitchman, and his conviction that his popcorn pops up lighter and fluffier may indeed be warranted, but does it matter? Not terribly. The infinitesimal variations of theme on basic products in capitalist society obfuscates the matter at hand: it's just fucking popcorn.
Here, of course, Orville gives us a glimpse of imaginary Americana at it's finest. Pure Norman Rockwell shmaltz. He tells us it took him forty years to perfect his popcorn. Let's just think about that a bit.
Alexander conquered the known world by the age of 18.
Jesus Christ completed his earthly mission and ascended to the heavens by 33.
America had had two World Wars in the space of less than 30 years.
And there's old Orville, tinkering away on his fucking popcorn.
Wikipedia, that real life Hitchhiker's Guide, gives us the seedier side of Orville's demise:
"On September 19, 1995, while in the whirlpool tub of his condominium in Coronado, Redenbacher suffered a heart attack and drowned. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea."
Who knew he had a whirlpool? Who knew he was really living in California? Who knew he lived in a condominium?
And thus, like Henry Ford (personal friend of Adolf Hitler), Thomas Edison (who used AC, invented by his rival, George Westinghouse, to invent the electric chair in order to smear AC as deadly and uncontrollable) and Ronald McDonald (known pedophile), Orville Redenbacher was at last in a hot air popper called Hell, ready to pop up lighter and fluffier than his competitors.
Then, of course, 12 years go by, and sales are down, what's to do? When you make a Faustian bargain like Colonel Sanders and Orville Redenbacher, signing your own name and image away to a product that keeps on keepin' on long after you've gone to the Choir Invisible, the Walt Disney Protocol kicks in. Children, claymation, public domain characters, Shrek franchised green kernels, and finally, ZOMBIE REDENBACHER.
Look upon this horror and despair!
Now, this thing is undeniably eerie. His face seems to bob up and down out of sync to the body, and the insistence on giving him an iPod seems heretical. But wait! What thought through yonder synapse breaks? It occurs to me that I've seen this face before.
Yes.
Yes.
IT'S COMING TO ME.
THAT'S RIGHT. IT'S THE RUBBERY FACED FAKE PETER CUSHING FROM REVENGE OF THE SITH!
I'm glad he's still getting work, what with the Six Flags gig in a bit of a dry spell.
Sexualcabinetry is the Weeklygeek's in-house media snoop. When he's not obsessing over the minutiae of CGI based popping corn inventors, he's in a street brawl somewhere south of Chinatown. He eagerly looks forward to the Bob Ross video game.
What say you?!