Classic(ally Bad) TV Commercials: A Whole Lotta Lovin’ with a Plumper!
According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 17% of American children are considered obese. Did you ever wonder why? Well perhaps this commercial from the 1980’s will give us a good reason why:
There’s just so much wrong with this commercial, I can hardly stand it. First, let’s address the obesity issue. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your kids eating a hot dog or two, as long as it stops there. But having five kids parade around with a 12-foot long, three-foot high, hot dog while singing show tunes is just bad for their health and their social lives. Can you imagine what would happen if they actually ate that thing? For one, they wouldn’t “poop a plumper” in about three years thanks to the constipation. Second, they’d weigh about 426 pounds at the tender age of eight. That’s not obese, that’s just plain sick. And speaking of sick, how many tons of ground up horse lips and chicken beaks does it take to fill up the mother of all hot dogs? And where do you get enough spicy brown mustard to cover that thing?
The other big issue has to deal with the name of the product itself. On its face, I’m just not sure I could ever stick a “plumper” in my mouth knowing it was called a plumper. Hot dogs are already known and wieners and we know what that’s slang for. They might as well just call them “schlong daddies” or “meat logs” while they’re at it. Then there’s the even bigger issue of the name, and how it has evolved over the last 20 years.
Unknown by the product maker, and hopefully to the kids, the term “plumper” would evolve into a phrase representing really fat women. Well, I wish I could leave it at that. It means really fat women starring in porn. Just one quick Google search of “Plumpers” should give you the icky feeling you deserve to feel when you hear little kids singing about plumpers having “more to love”. Yes little Johnny and little Jenny, plumpers do have more to love. That’s why these websites charge $24.95 a month to have you look at them. Some people get their kicks from flop-sweat sex, and seeing the young Asian girl handle the Ron Jeremy-esque hot dog in this commercial probably sparked the idea that fat people having sex should be called plumpers.
And as if I didn’t feel bad enough for these kids who now have to live with the memory of doing a Broadway musical for a hot dog, I feel really bad for the kid at the end. I’m sure he hasn’t eaten a hot dog in 20 years because it took 20 takes to get that shot right. That comes out to about four or five plumpers in one day and God knows even Peter North couldn’t have handled that.
If there are two things you should learn from this commercial they should be: 1. Don’t name your product after something that could mean something different in the mind of a teenage boy (ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME, PRODUCERS OF “NADS”?!?), and 2. knowing now wieners were once called plumpers should keep your kids far away from hot dogs. Feed them a hamburger instead… but only one so we can cut down on obesity in this country.
