Perhaps by now you have forgotten, but roughly four years ago we Americans were introduced to a very special... creature. The spongemonkey. These singing, floating, silly hat wearing dilapidated fuzz balls sparked enormous amounts of water cooler conversations. Oddly enough at the same time, they were actually selling subs. Quiznos subs no less. Obviously these rodent like guitar playing googely eyed chaps represented nothing that could sanely be related to the franchise, yet they were still given their own 15 minutes of fame and produced adequate advertising for Quiznos. Oddly enough, these spongemonkeys existed prior to their American commodification on national television. In January 2003 the creatures were created by Joel Veitch in Britain for a short video seen below.
As you can see that video makes no sense. It relates to nothing, it sells nothing, it more or less absorbs brain cells that could have been spent more wisely. Now simply change the background and the words with the same exact guitar riff and silly animals and what do you have?
I never thought I'd live to see the day when America would comodify a spongemonkey. Possibly a form of reification being that the spongemonkey was not originally intended for a Quizno's commercial let alone any form of American television. Somehow, someway, an American food chain managed to commodify a british fictional creature to help sales, and amazingly enough it worked. Because love them or hate them, you can't help but talk about them.
1 comment:
Awesome post and great writing! (Nice YouTube archival research, too.) Just one question: has *America* really commodified the "singing, floating, silly hat-wearing, dilapidated... rodent-like, guitar-playing, googly- eyed chaps" (LOL!) so much as Quizno's has? It seems more like Quizno's was the agent here, reaching across the ocean to appropriate some British internet nonsense "phenomenon" and transplant it as a reified symbol of the company's cultural hipness and computer savvy, all meant to make us talk about it, just as you point out. What's the thing about advertising? Even if people hate it, at least they're saying the product name.
Great topic choice for a post.
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