The Kool-Aid Man (In Pants)
A most perplexing 20-second, partially-animated Kool-Aid commercial aired recently on Nick at Night in the midst of a "Different World" rerun. Sandwiched between downright matronly ads for Caltrate (good for your colon and your bones) and Benefiber, it opens with the sound of thundering chopper blades and a shot of three kids peering through the windshield of a yellow CGI helicopter. The middle one is looking through a pair of yellow binoculars directly at the camera. The shot widens and we see the animated body of the yellow helicopter, which is labeled "RESCUE."
"We gotta help him!" cries one kid. "Look! There he is!" yells another. We see, in binocular view, an animated aerial shot of the Kool-Aid Man waving his arms around on the beach of a small, pitcher-shaped island in the middle of the ocean. The next shot is the three kids from the helicopter running down a beach while the little CGI helicopter flies away, apparently abandoning them.
"We saw your S.O.S!" one of the kids screams at the Kool-Aid Man. "S-U-S!" he corrects them, "Stir It Up Singles!" "New Kool-Aid Singles!" an excited kid voice-overs as the Kool-Aid Man opens up a piratey treasure chest to reveal a trove of said Singles. "You can make it yourself! Grab a glass!" explains the Kool-Aid Man. "Wow!" "Cooool!" say the kids, and we see them, grinning like jack-o-lanterns, dumping little packets of sugary powder into crystal clear glasses of water. "It's a blast in glass — or a bottle!" they say, stirring and shaking like pros. The camera pans out and suddenly there are a whole bunch of other kids there, too (tailies, maybe?), dancing around happily. The Kool-Aid Man is in the middle, standing behind some sort tiki bar. "OHHH YEAH!" he bellows, flashing us a disproportionately huge CGI thumbs-up as the commercial ends.
The ad raises several questions: Why is the Kool-Aid Man luring children to a desert island? Why did the rescue helicopter just dump them off there? How did the Kool-Aid man even get on a random island in the middle of the ocean? Where did all those other kids come from? The list is endless. But despite all of the weird, loose ends and myriad unanswered questions left in the wake of this hectic little commercial, when I saw it, I could only think about one thing:
The Kool-Aid Man's dick.
Why? Because he was wearing fucking shorts! Camouflage cargo shorts, to be exact. His little legs are so short that they were basically pants on him, but you could tell they were shorts. It would never have occurred to me that the Kool-Aid Man might possess genitalia if he hadn't been so purposefully covered up. He never used to wear anything and the last thing on anyone's mind was his package (or lack thereof). He's a pitcher, for chrissakes! His smooth, glass nether-globe is so featureless it makes a naked Ken doll look pornographic. When and why did he start shopping at Old Navy?
Admittedly, it's been at least 15 years since I saw the Kool-Aid Man with any regularity. It's possible that he's been laying low in the interim, chilling in the Honeycomb Hideout, playing Mousetrap with The Getalong Gang and Vicky from "Small Wonder" since the days of the first Bush administration, though the more likely explanation is that I no longer spend several slack-jawed hours a day watching "USA Cartoon Express" and the never-ending "messages" of its sponsors.
But I remember fondly the commercials of my youth, in which the Kool-Aid Man would exuberantly crash through brick and drywall when bidden by lucky children who had only to yell "Hey Kool-Aid!" to make such wonderful things happen. "Ohhhh yeah!" the Kool-Aid Man would bellow, pouring everyone a glass, beaming at the children happily guzzling his lifeblood amidst the rubble. He was a big pitcher of red Kool-Aid with red arms and legs — a guy in a suit, like the characters at Disney World or Chucky Cheese. He was slightly fuzzy, as if he was made out of Muppet. And he was always, unfailingly, totally buck naked.
You can't fault Kool-Aid for scrapping the guy-in-the-suit approach in favor of CGI when the technology became available. Sure, the CGI version is a million times lamer and far less lovable than the guy in the suit, but if it's what the kids are used to these days, fine, the future marches on. But why clothe him? It isn't like the Kool-Aid Man was busted for drunkenly exposing himself to 7th graders at the bowling alley. Run him through your state's sex offender database — a thousand bucks says he isn't there. Think back to when you used to see him regularly between segments of "Smurfs" and "Transformers" — do you recall seeing his giant cock, turgid with Kool-Aid, bobbing and slapping luridly against the heads and necks of the kids whose drinks he poured? Me neither.
Who is the sex-obsessed, filthy-minded Puritan freak who decided this was necessary? Maybe when she's done examining stills from Cars for glimpses of vehicular vagina, she will write in and explain her twisted reasoning and abiding concern for our purity.
And you know that such a substantial change in the appearance of a company's historic and iconic mascot wouldn't — nay, couldn't — happen without a whole slew of meetings. Staff meetings, strategy meetings, board meetings... maybe even (oh the horror) an off-site retreat, replete with enforced brainstorming, "breakout sessions," and poison-fumed markers squeaking out lists of pros and cons on giant, easel-propped pads of paper. (Pros: Covers up Kool-Aid Man's latent/ever-present penis/testes. Chance to make him fashionable. Pockets. Cons: Draws attention to prior decades of nudity. Fucking retarded in every way.) Dozens of people — adults! — had to discuss the issue over and over again for months. They probably hired pricey consultants. Thousands of man-hours, millions of dollars, all spent on what? Establishing the existence of a fictional spokescharacter's johnson and then figuring out how to hide it.
It's enough to make you pine for the old Kool-Aid Man. The real one, the guy in the fuzzy costume, who could crash through walls, take out his pitcher of Kool-Aid and, maybe, in this special case, use it to beat some much-needed sense into the heads of some stupid, prudish corporate suits. OHHHH YEAAAHH.
— Alissa Rowinsky Wright (alissa@flakmag.com)
