There’s a cute ad for Planters Peanuts where there’s a Christmas Party (or non-denominational winter holiday, to be inclusive), and a Nutcracker shows up. He is portrayed as the villain of this piece. But that’s not the whole story! There is a secret backstory here Planters doesn’t want you to know about!
It turns out that the Nutcracker was not always a nutcracker. Yes, the Nutcracker here used to be a mild-mannered benign kitchen implement that never harmed anyone, but then someone he loved died from a peanut allergy (!), and he swore revenge! And so he trained to be a nutcracker just like Uma Thurman trained under Pai Mei in Kill Bill, and after years of rigorous training, he finally earned his jaws as a nutcracker, changing his name to Nutcracker to hide his identity so that he could sneak up unrecognized to get his revenge against the peanut that killed the one he loved! Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t very smart, and posing as a nutcracker and calling himself: “Nutcracker” raised suspicions within the nut community, and so our heroic murderous Planters peanut was onto him and was able to defend himself adequately.
Oh, but then it turns out that the Planters peanut mascot did not actually personally kill the Nutcracker’s loved one, but rather, he hired another peanut to do it for him (!), and so in the eyes of the law, he’s innocent, because nobody else knows he hired the other peanut to kill the Nutcracker’s loved one, and because the hired peanut assassin had to die to assassinate the Nutcracker’s loved one, that peanut is no longer around to testify about what actually happened.
And so the nut police have a séance to contact the dearly departed spirit of the murderous hired assassin peanut, but it turns out that unbeknownst to them they accidentally hire a phony spiritualist, and the séance is a sham. But in the dark, with the lights out, the Nutcracker is able to sneak out of his chair in the circle in the darkness, and he kills the Planters Peanut mascot, finally getting revenge after all these years. And to cover it all up so that nobody suspects that their mascot actually hired an assassin to kill someone with a peanut allergy, Planters hires a lookalike peanut to act as their new mascot without telling anyone, and nobody ever finds out the truth (until now…).
Here’s the pernicious peanut piece (actually a super fun ad: one of the best!):
