Does anybody remember where the expression: “Sorry,
Charlie!” comes from? (Nope, it’s not from Charlie Sheen!) I do; it comes from
an old advertising campaign for Star-Kist canned tuna fish from the 1970s.
Charlie was a blue cartoon tuna fish who wanted to be caught, killed, filleted,
canned, marketed, distributed, and sold by Star-Kist, and then eaten by us. But
because they kept on deciding that he wasn’t good enough, they’d keep rejecting
him with the quote: “Sorry, Charlie!” So he was basically like a 1970s version
of the Foster Farms turkeys (you know, the turkey puppets with a death wish
from the Foster Farms ads who keep trying to cheat to become Foster Farms
turkeys only to be rejected for cheating. {See? When you cheat, you’re really
only cheating yourself! Let that be a lesson to all you make-believe wannabe
foodstuffs.}), except that he didn’t have bell-bottoms and a gold medallion
around his neck like most people from the 70s (because he was a fish). But
because he really wanted it so badly, Charlie would try, ad after ad, to cheat
and scam his way into the Star-Kist tuna can by dressing up in various
costumes, pretending to engage in certain bourgeois activities, etc., in order
to try to trick them into thinking that he had “good taste”, only to be told by
some snarky fish with a Brooklyn accent that: “Star-Kist don’t want tunas with
good taste; Star-Kist wants tunas that taste good.” Well, at least he was
persistent; kind of like Wile E. Coyote.
So what do we know about this guy Charlie? Well, time after
time we’d see that he’s not high enough quality to even qualify for canned tuna
fish (I mean, with the way they’ve been over-fishing the ocean with huge nets
for years, he must be the absolute nadir of tuna quality to be thrown back so
consistently, time after time, when they’re even pulling in dolphins and
porpoises. How do we know this? Well, it’s because the ads kept saying so when
they would explain why he kept getting rejected: “Sorry, Charlie! Only
good-tasting tuna get to be Star-Kist!” So obviously he tastes bad.), and that he’s a liar and a cheat, and a poseur: In his ads, he was always trying to
pretend to be something he wasn’t, and he wasn’t even any good at pretending,
since he didn’t even know anything about what he was pretending to be. Oh, yes,
and the most important thing: he has really, really bad taste. Sure, he was always trying to pretend that he had
good taste, but we could always tell that he clearly didn’t.
Now that’s pretty funny when you consider what Charlie’s
current role is in the latest Star-Kist ad campaign on television. What’s that,
you might ask? Well, apparently despite having certifiable bad taste, and proof
of the fact that he’s a poseur, a liar, and a con-man (and an incompetent one
at that!), Charlie has scammed his way into being the chef and spokesman for
Star-Kist’s new line of entrees! Yes, that’s right: they’ve got him (the blue
cartoon tuna fish that they hammered into our heads for years had bad taste and
was too bad-tasting and low quality for us to eat) in a white chef’s hat
bragging about his delicious new entrees. Now, I suppose we should feel
grateful when we see him to know that he’s not actually in the entrees, based on how disgusting we know he must
actually taste, but do we really want a guy with such bad taste cooking our
food? (And not just bad taste, but such a long, consistent record of failure at
everything he tried to do.) I’m just saying, maybe despite some solid brand
recognition, perhaps the Star-Kist ad guys should have thought a little bit
more carefully about what it is
we remember Charlie for.
Want to see Charlie star in one of the Star-Kist tuna
commercials from the 1970s? (I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to find the ad I saw
on television last night on the internet yet. But keep your eye out for it!):
Want to see a more glowing account of Charlie the Star-Kist
tuna? It’s at:
