Wednesday, September 10, 2008
A recent picture taken by an ever-keen friend got us thinking about one of our more traumatizing childhood memories.
Mascots for brands of foods tend to be very disturbing and doubly so when they're the actual food itself. Does it bother anyone else that some of our most loved mascots are imploring you to eat them?
Okay, so Charlie Tuna's not very lovable (Is that his hair? Is he wearing a beret?), but everyone loves the Pillsbury Doughboy, and what man wouldn't want to be the dashing Mr. Peanut? What woman wouldn't want to spend a night embraced in his...arms? So it's easy to miss the gruesome irony behind their smile of lies. With other mascots, it's not, such as the horrifying Halo Burger Cow.
When we were a child, this terrified us. It's not enough that you have to be reminded of how adorable the thing you're eating used to be, no, Halo Burger trips even the most clearly defined boundaries of taste and decency and shows the cow licking its lips! Somehow it's tasted the blood of its own species--perhaps the flesh from its very own hide--and is hungry for more!
Okay, so Charlie Tuna's not very lovable (Is that his hair? Is he wearing a beret?), but everyone loves the Pillsbury Doughboy, and what man wouldn't want to be the dashing Mr. Peanut? What woman wouldn't want to spend a night embraced in his...arms? So it's easy to miss the gruesome irony behind their smile of lies. With other mascots, it's not, such as the horrifying Halo Burger Cow.
When we were a child, this terrified us. It's not enough that you have to be reminded of how adorable the thing you're eating used to be, no, Halo Burger trips even the most clearly defined boundaries of taste and decency and shows the cow licking its lips! Somehow it's tasted the blood of its own species--perhaps the flesh from its very own hide--and is hungry for more!
Equally disturbing, especially to a schooled and cowardly child like we, was the knowledge that cows are herbivores, and if Halo Burgers were enough to throw 1400 pounds of peace-loving mammal into a goddamn cannibalistic frenzy, just imagine what it'd do to a mincing little tot like we!
But we decided to face our fears and go in search of other similarly disturbed mascots. What we found was that pigs are chillingly overrepresented in the creepy-mascot crowd:
Somehow we don't feel as off-put about pigs telling you to eat them or their families, since pigs will eat anything, so it's likely they had it coming, but this trend of endorsing cannibalism should make a lot of people uneasy. And we shudder to think why so many have let it slip by unnoticed...
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