Friday, June 19, 2015

Whooping Cough Big Bad Cough Ad

I like this ad warning about Whooping Cough. (That’s the couch that sounds like you’re yelling: “Whoop! Whoop!” A lot of rappers have it, apparently.) In this ad, we see a grandmother pretend to love her grandchild, a newborn baby, but it’s all a ruse, for Grandma is secretly a werewolf (!), and plans to kill and eat the child, which is a reasonable metaphor for Whooping Cough, I think everyone agrees.

Okay, so maybe it doesn’t make as much sense as they’d like, but at least it warns us of the dangers of Whooping Cough, and of the fact that all grandmothers are werewolves. No, really: that Little Red Riding Hood story was to try to warn us of the werewolf grandmother thing, but the authors couldn’t be too accurate, or else they’d be killed by their werewolf grandmothers, so they had to pretend that a wolf came and killed and then replaced Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother, when her grandmother was the (were)wolf the whole time, and that’s what the story is trying to tell us! And your grandmother is one too!

And Little Red Riding Hood’s parents were obviously trying to get rid of her by sending her alone to Grandma’s house without any silver bullets. Or maybe it’s just because they were vampires that they didn’t want to go to Grandma’s house and made Little Red Riding Hood go alone, because as we’ve learned from movies like Van Helsing and the Underworld series, werewolves kill vampires. And that proves that the werewolf grandmothers are only going to try to kill baby vampires, so normal human children are probably safe, I think. Except that grandmothers are always trying to give human babies Whooping Cough so nobody finds out they’re werewolves, or something.

It all makes perfect sense if you’ve seen enough horror movies.

But the thing that makes this Little Red Riding Hood parallel work the best is that, as we all know from the story, Little Red Riding Hood was a newborn baby, like in this ad, and that’s why this ad resonates so well with fans of the fairy tale. Or, wait, um… Uh, never mind. (I still like this ad’s imagery as a wolf representing the threat of Whooping Cough due to the fact that all wolves have Whooping Cough, so it’s appropriate, and it’s only not called Wolfing Cough because animal rights activists protested to get the name changed because they said it denigrated wolves and caused them to be hunted to extinction.)

Oddly, I can’t seem to find this ad online, but surprisingly there’s a short ‘behind the scenes’ documentary about the ad that shows parts of the ad available on YouTube, so I’m including the link to that instead of the actual ad: