Everyone likes Kinder Surprise - the fiddly wrapper, the insubstantial chocolate, the crap toy that you’ll either get bored of within thirty seconds or choke to death upon (thereby becoming a playground urban myth for many a century to come, just like that boy everyone ‘knew’ who swallowed a biro lid).
Why, then, did the people behind the 1980s advertising campaign for this children’s favourite decide on this monstrosity? Christ almighty - hecklerspray was lucky enough never to have seen this as a kid, but if we had it would’ve a) put us off Kinder Eggs for life, and b) psychologically devastated us until the day we died.
Come to think of it - it’s actually just done both.
Just take a look at hecklerspray’s regular Badvertising feature, in which we take commercials presently oozing from your television screen and vehemently assert how rubbish they are. It’s a non-stop loathefest. And we’re tired, people. Tired.
So. We’ve decided to take a short break, see. Instead of showing you something lousy, we’re going to treat you to what is hands-down the best commercial ever made.
This is a 1992 advert for the Nintendo game Legend Of Zelda, and we’ll be damned if it doesn’t have the catchiest pop number this side of The Monkees, a strangely androgynous lead character battling all sorts of monsters, a crazy caged Princess and a dance routine that - in any sane universe - would be sweeping club floors nationwide.
What is actually happening in this commercial? We have no idea. Enjoy.
For years, western celebrities have been able to make a quick buck by flying to Asia and making shameful adverts that they hope nobody will ever see.
That’s all a bit one-sided, which is why we should rejoice to the heavens the fact that Asian megastar Jackie Chan has decided to come to England to make his own shameful advert, this time for Woolworths.
Jackie Chan’s taste has always been questionable to say the least - not only does he have a Hasselhoffian collection of sincere pop CDs to his name, but he also thought The Tuxedo was a decent career endeavour. But nothing Jackie Chan has ever done really comes close to the sheer brain-denting craptitude of his Woolworths advert.
The thing we can’t get our heads around is that at no point did Jackie Chan or any of his people decide that the Woolworths ad was a bad idea. Not when Jackie Chan realised that he’d be starring opposite two animal puppets that looked like they were sewn together by a blind, web-fingered sweatshop orphan. Not when he realised the script made zero sense whatsoever. Not even when he realised that he’d be kissing his credibility goodbye in an advert to promote some 70p T-shirts.
It just doesn’t add up, which is why we think one of the following has happened: 1) Jackie Chan has fallen on really, really hard times, 2) That’s actually a copyright-infringing Jackie Chan double in the advert or 3) The CEO of Woolworths has Jackie Chan’s children tied up in a basement somewhere. Whichever one is true, Jackie Chan should be proud that we haven’t lost so much faith in a celebrity so quickly since, well, since ever.
When you think of Birds Eye, you think of food. You don’t think of once popular singers who hail from East Sussex.
Sadly though, it seems that Suggs, the singer of Madness has decided to suck the corporate cock of Birds Eye and let them ejaculate a substantial amount of money in his direction. All so he can promote their range of frozen foods. Everyone knows that the true spokesman of Birds Eye is, of course, Captain Birdseye - a man who could get us to eat anything from the sea, be it squid, eel or part of a rusty old bike. He had us in his fishy smelling palm. No-one could better him.
And it’s great to see Suggs make an absolute twat of himself as he tries to become the new Captain Birdseye. We don’t care if Birds Eye makes good mood food. Not when Suggs is making adverts that make us feel like we’ve died a bit inside. Just fuck off back to your creepy street where all the neighbours seem to like each other and there’s no annoying kid refusing to eat the same as everyone else.
Adverts don't sell products, they sell lifestyles - you're shown a beautiful, successful, happy person and told 'you too can be like this, if only you'd use Daz'.
So with that in mind, what the hell kind of a lifestyle is the Tabasco sauce advert trying to sell? Look at it - literally the only aspirational thing in there is the fact that the man looks like he had his hair cut quite recently. We've watched the Tabasco Sauce advert a few times now, and these seem to be the key messages it tries to pass on:
1 - To enjoy Tabasco Sauce, you really need to be an overweight sweaty redneck who lives in a rickety shack, eats noisily and probably kidnaps and rapes hitchhikers while wearing a homemade pigskin mask.
2 - You know how everyone's got half a bottle of Tabasco Sauce in their house that they never use? That's dumb! To really get the most out of Tabasco Sauce, you need to use three entire bottles of the bloody stuff on a single pizza. You might end up with halitosis, acid reflux and blood-splattered shit (although you might not) - and you'll definitely lose the ability to taste anything ever again as long as you live - but, hey, you'll be like this guy. This guy is cool!
3 - If you eat Tabasco Sauce a lot, mosquitoes will literally explode when they try and suck your blood. But - while this is good for warding off insects and, we'd imagine, vampires - try not to spend too long thinking about it. After all, if Tabasco Sauce can make mosquitoes explode, then just imagine what it's doing to the insides of your disgusting yokel body right now.
We all know that the roads are dangerous, what with chavs thinking they own the road in their 1995 custom designed Renaults, to cyclists believing they can do what they want.
Crossing the road was once a simple procedure, but it is now a risky thing to do and could result in death. So what could the government do to help raise awareness of road safety? Introduce a road tax? Randomly arrest motorists to take them of the road? Whilst the following reasons sound quite plausible, they weren’t implemented. Instead, they enlisted the help of the humble hedgehog.
Yup – that mighty beast that is boss of the animal kingdom and self-regulator of the roads. Only problem being that it gets run over more than humans do. It’s a familiar story. You’re driving down a country lane and it's getting dark. The light is bad and you can barely see in front of you. All of a sudden, there’s a sickly-sounding crack. It’s a hedgehog. Well a dead one. Sadly it didn’t follow its green cross code. Now it’s just worn in to the tarmac of the road like dogs, cats, pheasants and the occasional fox.
Having a hedgehog teaching us how to cross the road safely without ending up squished into someone's bonnet is like Amy Winehouse telling us the dangers of crack cocaine and Paul Gascoigne on the evils of excessive drinking, pretty much pointless and a waste of sodding time.
It seems that if you’re young, indie and naive then drugs are the way forward for you. After all, it’s impossible to go to prison for doing it.
You can be videoed by The Sun apparently taking drugs like Amy Winehouse or yo-yo in and out of court like Pete Doherty and you'll never ever wind up inside a jail cell. It seems that the attempts to stop the yoof of 2daytaking drugs haven’t quite worked. Take this video for example. Hell, even bloody Robocop doesn’t like drugs and wants to stop then. And Robocop means business.
So what’s bothering him? It’s not global warming or the diminishing cod population in the North Sea, it's bloody drugs. And if you want to stop taking drugs, then all you have to do is go to the Boys And Girls Club. Even though in our filthy minds the Boys And Girls Club sounds like a dodgy strip club, we'll do what Robocop says. He’s the law!
They say that teaching is a noble profession, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
Face it - spending your days trapped in a room with 30 hormonal bell-ends who vocally despise you isn't anyone's idea of fun. But you wouldn't know that from watching the government's current TV advert to try and encourage people to become teachers.
Titled Use Your Head, Teach, the advert attempts to show the kind of imaginative questions that youthful minds can dream up, but in reality it's a list of exactly the sort of queries that'd make a teacher's blood run cold. Honestly, ask a teacher any of the questions from the Use Your Head, Teach advert and you'll be able to see the precise moment they think "What? I've only been trained how to teach from this specific textbook. I don't know what the sodding universe expands into. I'm such a failure."
So, to help out any struggling teachers who've been caught out by the Use Your Head, Teach advert, we've painstakingly compiled the correct answer to every single one of the questions asked in it. Ready?
1 - Shut up. 2 - No. 3 - Wrong. 4 - Shut up. I don't know. Die? 5 - Shut up. 6 - Shut up. 7 - Wouldn't you like to know, fatty. 8 - Shut up. 9 - Have you ever met a blonde person? They're crap. 10 - Shut up. 11 - Oh, now you're just taking the piss. 12 -“Mer mer mer, look at me, I'm so deep.” Shut up and get a bloody haircut.
If Kerry Katona came up to you in the street and tried to sell you a box of prawns, chances are you'd run away just to escape the smell of stale nicotine and slightly off-kilter look in her eyes.
But despite this, freezer-heavy supermarket chain Iceland hasn't quite worked out that keeping troubled Kerry Katona on as the star of its TV ads is roughly the same as paying biblical priests to stand at the entrance of each of its stores screaming the word 'unclean' day and night.
Yesterday it was reported that Iceland had dropped Kerry Katona in light of her recently reported screwball behaviour. Turns out that was a lie.
If we had the chance to meet Mr T, we’d literally collapse in excitement and piss ourselves until our bladder was dry. However, after watching his latest commercial, we’d really just want to know where it all went wrong.
We all know and love Mr T as B.A Baracus from The A-Team, where every week he’d literally go ape-shit on all the evil-doers and make sure they’d never trouble the orphanage, little Jimmy or your mum ever again. He’s such a hard bloke that we’d never dream of even challenging him to a game of paper, stones and scissors. Probably because he wouldn’t use any of those three tools. He’d just use the fourth weapon of pain to kick our arse.
Television may be currently engulfed in giant fakery scandal that looks set to undermine the credibility of the entire medium, but we can always trust Kate Moss' eyelashes, can't we - Kate Moss' eyelashes would never let us down.
Wrong! Kate Moss' eyelashes don't even exist - they've been digitally created on a computer, much like Gollum or one of the Super Mario Brothers. It's true - watch the advert for Rimmel Magnif'Eyes mascara where Kate Moss hobbles down a road, looks in a shop window, flicks two molecules of Rimmel Magnif'Eyes mascara over her face and then watches as her eyelashes magically expand until it looks like someone has pulled out Kate Moss' eyeballs and plugged the holes with two giant flailing octopuses. Or rather, don't watch it. You can't see this particular Kate Moss Rimmel advert because the Advertising Standards Authority have said that it's basically a big lot of bullshit.
Ah the 1980s. The decade that time forget. Not a lot of interesting stuff happened back then. All hecklerspray knows about the eighties is that it was full of horrible cheesy pop songs that haunt many student nightspots and wedding receptions every week.
Also, this period of time produced some now brilliantly dated TV that we watch regularly through UK Gold and ABC1. With its shockingly bad canned laughter and dodgy looking sets, 1980s TV made Big Brother look watchable. It was also a time when places like McDonalds were riding high, before science worked out that dimwits only eating shit food would end up obese. Still, on the plus side, fatties back then had 20 years twenty years of power-eating to look forward to before realising that consuming junk food is the equivalent of self harming and suing the nutsacks off McDonalds.
Anyway, somebody on the McDonalds marketing team in the 1980s must have cottoned onto the fact that crap songs sell well. Putting two and two together, they came up with five - resulting in this strange advertising song - complete with a McDonalds dance! If you wanted to publicly proclaim you were a total twat, then doing the arches with McDonalds was probably the fastest way. We really hope the people in this advert were lynched for crimes against music, acting and selling their soul to McDonalds.
