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:
