Peeled Skinny

So did you watch Superbowl #44?  What did you eat while watching?  Peeled Skinny used the opportunity to eat Pizza (BAD Pizza, whose brand shall remain unnamed to protect the innocent) and drink beer, and, thankfully, NOT eat eggs.  Why not?  Because were I to have eaten eggs during the Superbowl, a certain very expensive commercial would have made me seriously ralph.

In the commercial, we see a chicken whispering to another chicken spreading some news, and the listening chicken shrieking in horror.  The news gets passed around, with chicken after chicken shrieking, till it even gets up to the president (a WHITE chicken president, I might add), who too shrieks.  Then we learn the news: Denny's is giving free grand-slam breakfasts on Tuesday the 9th, and they'll be needing LOTS of eggs!

How do you say "yuck" in chicken-speak?

Living in New York, I don't have to rely on Denny's (we have diners everywhere), but I certainly bare no ill-will to them.  When traveling I often eat there, and in general see Denny's as a success- they've found their way into many people's lives in a good way, and if they clog the occasional artery, they never pretend that their food will do otherwise.

And this commercial certainly has a joke to it, backed by production values that sell the message.  How ironic, though, that the clip's "message" (about chickens' unborn chicks being eaten en-mass by free-loading restaurant-goers) debuted the same year that the people in charge of the Super Bowl ads see fit to air a pro-life commercial.  Did the Denny's people collude at all with the "Focus-on-the-Family" people?  We suspect not.

The idea of the commercial, though, perversely mirrors the horror that we should all be feeling at our food industry.  How many eggs does it take for Denny's to pull this promotion off?  Well, apparently a nearly genocidal amount, enough that the President thinks about reaching for "the button".  The chicken horror should be shared, the commercial says, because we all know what it's like to have our children gobbled up with lines out the door.  For FREE, no less.  Or, if we don't know what that's like, we CAN at least LAUGH about it....

For Denny's to have used such imagery in a SUPER BOWL commercial is beyond post-modern.  It's a commercial analyzing people's horrified reaction at industrialized food, being analyzed by the industrialized food purveyors, who then turn it into a joke accentuating the horror, and magnifying it to a campy and WAY over-the-top degree.  It's Andy Warhol meets Albert Camus meets Ridley Scott, by way of the after-after-partiers at a Tea-Party convention.  It's pure genius, and purely sick.

I only wish I'd thought of it first.  Maybe Peeled Snacks could do a commercial like it, only instead of chickens we'd have Mango trees screaming in horror.  Hmmm.... maybe not.  Hope you enjoyed the Saints' victory as much as I did,

Ian K, Peeled Skinny and with a miserable post-Super Bowl tummy