This is the animated spot where a bottle of Ensure enters the refrigerator and starts bossing everyone around, with all the food inside anthropomorphized into animated characters, and then the tag line says: “Ensure: Nutrition in Charge!” Well, it strikes me that this bottle of Ensure’s actions could be construed as bullying, seeing as how Ensure doesn’t have any actual authority over other foods. And isn’t bullying supposed to be bad (and illegal)? Maybe these other foods could call the food police and get the Ensure arrested. (Oh, but then naturally the food police would side with the Ensure and beat the complaining foods into a pulp with a Slim Jim truncheon, because the real life food police is always bullying overweight people into eating more healthy foods, even though they taste bad, so they’d be of no help here. And naturally, since they say meat is so harmful, they would use beef jerky to hit others with to illustrate their claims.)
But this commercial really makes me think of what the government is trying to do to us: bully and force us into eating only “healthy” foods. (Scientists will probably eventually discover that health food is the worst food for humans, and that processed junk food is the best thing for longevity and good health, just like in Woody Allen’s movie: Sleeper. Then it will come out that health foods are what made people live for such a truncated lifespan in the past, and that the government forced us all to eat this stuff so they would save money on healthcare costs by killing us sooner!) So when I see this spot, it really drives home the point about how a healthy diet is so unpalatable that we must be bossed around in order to even acquiesce to the indignity of eating it, and that the government’s food police is only too happy to bully us in this manner (but then secretly force us to eat stuff like pink slime, apparently!).
But the other thing that pops into my head when I see this ad is the movie Full Metal Jacket, where “Private Pyle”, who was bullied for being all fat and out-of-shape, etc., finally snapped and shot and killed the drill sergeant. Is that what’s going to happen to this bottle of Ensure? This food had an easy life before that bossy bottle came along! I mean, okay, admittedly some of them got pulled out of the refrigerator by a giant, ravenous hand and they were eaten alive (!), but it was either that or the garbage disposal’s whirling blades of death, so it’s not like they would have gotten to live forever in the fridge anyway. But before the Ensure showed up, life was pretty good (and cool) for the food. Oh, but now that this bully health nut has arrived, their life has become a living hell of calisthenics, insults and intimidation, and they just can’t take it anymore! So I’ll bet some piece of junk food will be pushed to the limit, driven over the edge, and snap and kill this bully bottle of Ensure! And who can blame them? It’s a short life for food before they’re killed horribly, and shouldn’t they be able to enjoy what little time they’ve got, without being harassed by some self-appointed persecutor? Those foods are patriots, throwing off the oppressive yolk of tyranny! And as such, they’re far more American than any would-be health food monarch!
Yes, I’m afraid that showing the Ensure as the dictatorial despot bossing the other food around might just make Americans instinctively reject or rebel against it. So why not make it seem like an inspirational leader, rather than a bullying, badgering bastard? After all, it’s not like this food has voluntarily joined the army, right? So what right has this overbearing bossy beverage bottle to subject them all to boot camp? Or have they all been drafted into the “war on obesity”? Well, if so, then they should burn their draft cards and escape to Canada, only to come back and become a hippie protest movement, man! “Hell no, we won’t go!” (Hmmm, hippies protesting against health food? Maybe my metaphor’s not the most appropriate one to illustrate my point either!)
Here’s the authoritarian advertisement:
