Yes, I’m having a hard time believing it too, but it’s true: There is a Ben-Gay commercial where evil snowmen massage a bunch of red globs that look like what the Kool Aid mascot would look like if someone put some Jell-O in him and poured him out of the pitcher. But because they’re evil snowmen, it looks rather like they’re torturing the Kool Aid guy after smashing his pitcher shell, which I suppose acts kind of like a turtle shell to protect him. And this is kind of freaky, since I didn’t know that Kool Aid guy was into Sado-Masochism. But I guess seeing is believing!
I think this tableau is intended to make us think of something soothing, but it just ends up looking like some perverted porno made by Rankin-Bass with the puppets from those Christmas specials. Maybe next they can have it look like that abominable snowman from the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back is massaging Jabba the Hut! That’s kind of the same idea, I guess, but with a Star Wars theme, so it would be especially good for marketing to nerds and Comicon-types.
This ad is not available for viewing on the internet, and I can’t say I’m surprised: they’d make mincemeat of it in the comments section of YouTube, I’ll bet!
When I was growing up, this product (Ben-Gay) was given a very, um, hard time for the fact that it has “Gay” in its name, and people named “Ben” were given an especially difficult time in sports practice, usually being referred to by the product name. But now that we’re more open-minded as a society about issues of same-sex relationships, maybe this product will be given to less ridicule for its name. But probably not.
But they’ve never used the fact that there is the word “Gay” in their product name as an asset for marketing to the gay community. I wonder, why not? Hey, it’s there: use it to your advantage! Here’s an idea for an ad for Ben-Gay aimed at the gay market:
Some muscular guy gets home from work, takes off his hard hat, takes off his shirt, and acts like his muscles hurt. So he gets a tube of Ben-Gay, puts some on his shoulders, and then another muscular shirtless guy walks up from behind him and starts massaging his shoulders. The announcer says: “Ben-Gay: It’s like having a gay guy named Ben massaging your aching muscles, giving you a happy ending!” Then, the guy getting the massage turns around to face the Ben guy, and they start kissing. Focus goes to blurry, and the ad ends with showing a product shot of a package of Ben-Gay superimposed over the blurry background.
That would be informative and silly, and who knows, it might even help sell their product too! (So long as homophobes don’t see it! But actually, homophobes probably don’t buy Ben-Gay anyway out of a sense of homosexual panic. I’ll bet they buy Icy Hot instead, since it doesn’t have the word “Gay” in the name. Maybe Icy Hot and Ben-Gay ought to work together to develop a new product called: “Hot Gay”, just to make homophobes feel extra uncomfortable. Then they could send out free samples of it through the mail to conservative anti-gay-rights groups, just to get their goat.)
