One thing that is incredibly irritating about pop culture right now - and really for most of the past decade, at least - is the complete dearth of willingness on the part of the people bankrolling projects to do absolutely anything new. Movies are constantly being remade or getting legacy sequels. Every TV show of the 1990s is currently getting a reboot featuring the original cast. Even on Broadway, it seems like 90% of new musicals are just adapted versions of popular movies. Hey! Is this a thing you're familiar with? Well guess what! We have more of it for you!
Commercials have long been at the vanguard of this sort of thing, of course - find a popular pitchman or spokescharacter and you can trot him out there for decades. (Just ask the Geico Gecko, who turns 25 this coming year, if you can believe that.) But there's a difference between having a consistent spokesman and just... completely redoing an old ad.
This is a very famous commercial, of course. "Who are the Chefs?" "Great googly moogly." This ad is 26 years old and I would bet that most people who were at least ten years old in 1997 would recognize those lines even with zero context. Now, suppose you had the idea to update this ad. How would you do it? Hmm, maybe you could get a famous person to appear in it. That would be good. And what if you otherwise... made it unambiguously worse in every way?
Why is this worse? Well, let's start here: it simply adds nothing to the equation. Sure, they cast actual Chiefs coach Andy Reid instead of having that part played by an anonymous actor. But they completely undermine what that adds by making the groundskeeper into a totally anonymous actor. He doesn't even get a line??? Let me guess: you could pay him less that way. On the bright side, that means the famous line "great googly moogly" can be delivered by non-actor Andy Reid, who is utterly incapable of selling it. (The groundskeeper changes facial expression zero times in 30 seconds, so I don't know that he could have either, but maybe let him try.)
Then, we have Snickers taking this ad we all know, which also used their famous "Not going anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers" tagline, and not including that part of it. "Rookie mistake? Maybe you just need a Snickers." What? This barely even makes sense. I assume it's just an extension of the "you're not you when you're hungry" slogan they used for years, and sure, if I can remember an ad that's old enough to rent a car without paying for supplemental liability insurance I can probably also remember ads that aired in the last 15 years. But out of context it's pretty clunky.
As long as we're getting actual Chiefs employees in this ad, it seems like it would have been a slam dunk to get someone else pretty famous, like Patrick Mahomes or Travis Kelce, to play the role of "second football player" from the original ad. But having already given "great googly moogly" to Andy Reid, and having cast a groundskeeper with no personality, we don't really have the option of ending with that same tag. So instead we get a new scene in which Andy Reid gets yet ANOTHER line, the knee-slapper "Eh, maybe no one'll notice." Even by usual commercial standards of "This is phrased like a joke and placed where you would put a joke, but it's not written like a joke and definitely isn't funny," this is pretty dire. (Granted, the original ad's closer wasn't much to write home about either. But if you're going to change it, maybe put any effort into improving it.)
In some respects, this almost annoys me even more than most of the shitty movie remakes out there. Maybe you get a lazy script with cheap callbacks, but writing a whole two-hour movie is hard. This is a 30-second ad. How difficult could it really have been to at least make it AS good as the original? Surely Andy Reid didn't tell you he would only appear in the ad if he could deliver the "great googly moogly" line. Get a funny actor and have someone sell that line the way it's supposed to fucking sound. Really, what was even the point here? It's one thing to try to get people to buy movie tickets with the promise of characters they already know they like. Are you really trying to sell Snickers to the same people you were trying to sell it to a quarter-century ago? Would a younger person who doesn't know the original ad think this was funny, especially when Reid delivers the one laugh line so flatly? Are you still allowed to call yourself a "creative" if your best idea is taking someone else's idea from decades ago and making it worse?
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