This Pixaresque spot for Country Crock fake butter spread
has a little kid in a Tyrannosaurus Rex (or Allosaurus) costume saying
dinosaurs eat meat, but his mother tells him the biggest dinosaurs ate plants,
and he says she’s lying and bites her face off. Okay, actually, he doesn’t bite
her face off, because he’s not even a real dinosaur. They tricked us! There’s
no truth in advertising!
Okay, just kidding, there is some truth in advertising, I
guess. (<My sponsors made me say that, but don’t believe them!)
So then this becomes some tortued metaphor for Country
Crock, which is some margarine or whatever it is, and the baby dinosaur who
wanted to eat meat now has to settle for saturated fats melted onto vegetables:
a lethal combination for meat-eating dinosaurs! But does the baby dinosaur’s
mother care? No! (I am calling dinosaur child protective services; and they eat
negligent parents of meat-eating dinosaurs both real and imaginary.)
Actually, what this ad reminds me of most is my grammar
school friendship with a Jehovah’s Witness. You see, Jehovah’s Witnesses
apparently, if my experience is the usual one, believe literally what is in
their mistranslated Bible, and ONLY what’s in their mistranslated Bible. And they
don’t want their children contaminated with ideas from infidels like me, so my
friend, my best friend at the time (second grade), was never allowed to come
over to me house; I could only go over to his house. And one time I brought
over a plastic dinosaur which my friend’s mom immediately took away from me
because I said it ate meat. Well, she revealed to me the truth, which is that
all dinosaurs only ate plants because that’s what the Bible says (something
about the sea monsters ate the vegetation of the land, or whatever it said),
and I took her word for it. Actually, I didn’t: I contradicted her, which made
her force Bible study on us in lieu of play. And I am ashamed to say so,
although maybe not as ashamed as I should be, but I wished a big Tyrannosaurus
Rex would have appeared to prove her wrong by eating her right then and there.
And then my friend would have been able to come over to play at my house, where
my family would have all conspired to mislead him with heresy all the time just
to make Jehovah mad.
And so, I think this ad should be made into a Jehovah’s
Witness version where the kid wears the dinosaur suit and tells his mother
dinosaurs eat meat, and then his mother says the Bible says the dinosaurs only
ate plants, and now he has to go do Bible study for the next four hours. And
just for that, he can’t have any of the plants she was cooking with Country
Crock: the only margarine that’s Jehovah’s Witness approved! Witness its great
taste for yourself, unless Jehovah commands you against doing it because of your
heresy!
Here’s the man-masticating margarine marketing:
And here’s another animated fake dinosaur ad that makes just
about as much sense as this one, only it’s a lot more fun: “Petroleum Pete”, from
Robot Chicken:
