Sure it's sacred, but can it turn a profit? Let's raze Mount Rushmore and build a strip mall. Let's stick a Sbarro in the Statue of Liberty's head. Yellowstone needs fewer geysers and more luxury condos. So sayeth the advertisers, men who are paid to remind us of what meaningless lives we live unless we buy whatever it is that they're peddling. We're all familiar with the same old tried and true tricks: half-naked women, pathos, celebrities of varying importance. But never in my life have I seen something so tasteless as the recent KFC commercials, wherein actors portray Colonel Harland Sanders, the long-dead founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the reason I weighed 200 pounds in junior high.
How can something so wrong taste so right?
Sanders, who was so much more than an old man on a greasy cardboard bucket, is the American Dream if there ever was one. He began selling his chicken during the Great Depression, then began franchising it during the post-war economic boom. He sold the brand in the mid-1960s but stayed on as the public face of the company and the universally beloved advertising icon. And advertise he did, time and time again.
And again.
And, God bless his tired soul, again.
From the mid-1960s until his death in 1980, the Colonel hawked his secret recipe to any and every living room across America, and did an amazing job of it, too. But the advertising agency of Wieden & Kennedy realized that they don't care if he's turning over in his grave as long as he's turning a profit, so they have offered America this paltry substitute:
An actor, surrounded by the Von Trapp family's Appalachian cousins, portraying a man who has been dead for 35 years now, giggling and snorting and ruminating on how good it is to be "back [from the dead]" and how America hasn't eaten enough chicken in his absence (the original Colonel was never this pushy...).
My indignation doesn't stem from my love of fried chicken, or even my respect for a man brave enough to wear all white, every day. It comes from the fact that advertisers would rather resurrect a man to peddle poultry than create a new idea. Colonel Sanders has been a familiar face for decades, but for the love of God, can we let the man (or at least his likeness) rest in peace? There are obviously much bigger problems in our country, but unless we recognize these commercials as the disrespectful propaganda that they are and nip them in the bud, it won't be long before John F. Kennedy is trying to sell us Band-Aids and Mahatma Gandhi is the new spokesman for Pampers. Advertisers, try to salvage your last shred of decency in your unrelenting pursuit of profit and go back to using your one minute of airtime to try making us sad or horny or both.
