HANK RANKS, No. 15

The 3 Fast Food Commercials I Love To Fear & Loathe
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03 = Hardee's Jalapeno Thickburger

[link to the mersh]

Three firemen, the manliest of all men, sit around a table at their firehouse eating a robust Hardee's lunch while sirens and alarms blare in the background. Whenever I see this commercial, I keep expecting "Fire" by The Ohio Players to start jamming, but it never does. I kinda loathe that.

That's a Jalapeno Thickburger that the manliest of these three firemen is eating. That's 1/3rd pound of ground Angus beef, and probably another 1/3rd pound of vegetables, cheeses and sauces, including a generous helping of jalapeno peppers to heat things up to the intended intensity. Look at those eyes, clenched shut with a ravenous purpose. He better dig in, cuz he's also got about 1/4 pound of curly fries to get through as well...

But not only do we have all that heart-stopping beef being peddled to us, but the narrator keeps mentioning the need for COKE after COKE after COKE to cool those peppery-reflux fires...Our hero must drink about a gallon of ice cold COKE during this spot...

High fructose corn syrup and beef! High fructose corn syrup and beef! It's as American as that flag in the background, babycakes! Open wide and take a huge fucking bite of patriotism! High fructose corn syrup and beef!

It's as American as that apple sitting there...

Wait. What?

What's stranger than a fucking apple sitting there in half of a fast food burger ad, is the fact that a bite or two is obviously taken from it in the course of this 30 second spot.

I mildly loathe this commercial. If not the Ohio Players, maybe Kiss doing "Firehouse", would be nice, you know?

I've eaten one of these Jalapeno Thickburgers. Actually, I ate about half of it. The other half sat in my fridge for a week, and then I threw it out.

02 = Red Robin's Whiskey River BBQ Burger

[link to the mersh]

Ahh, The Department Of Deliciousness, as magically mythical and secretive as Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory, if you must know. Oh, those whimsical and clever burgermeisters at Red Robin...

The Whiskey River BBQ Burger is so utterly delicious, that it cannot even be eaten by Red Robin's own customers, and must be safeguarded behind a velvet rope, an electric fence, and a plexiglass wall.

But hey, you might not be able to eat one of these 1/3 pound burgers, complete with a huge layer of deep-friend onions, not to mention Red Robin's World Famous Bottomless™ Steak Fries, but you can visit The Pickle Room™, where you can presumably eat many pickles.

On the advise of their own commercial, I've never eaten one of Red Robin's Whiskey River BBQ Burgers. Actually, I've never eaten at Red Robin, and never will. They call their burgers "gourmet" but they're really just the same old lame mishmash of typical sauce, cheese and condiment combinations...Teriyaki, cheddar and pineapple...Chipotle sauce, swiss, and hickory smoked bacon...Steak sauce, swiss and sauteed mushrooms...Almost every last one of them with that layer of deep-friend onions...$8.49 and more, with half-assed names to boot...

No thanks, as I have blogged before, I've short-order cooked on more than one occasion in my past, and I've done my own fairly unique and absolutely tasty burgers that have better names, if nothing else.

If you don't want me to eat your burgers, Red Robin, you can go to hell. *snicker*

01 = Taco Bell's Cheesy Beefy Melt

[link to the mersh]

Listen, I refuse to eat one of these things because I simply won't say the words "one cheesy beefy melt, please" into a speaker at a Taco Bell drive-thru, let alone directly to another human being. I only eat at Taco Bell about half a dozen times a year anyways, so the potential is low to begin with...Grilled steak burrito, babycakes.

The TV commercial for the Cheesy Beefy Melt™ is surreal from the start. A young woman and man eating their gooey stringy melts on a train platform, their joyous eyes meeting as Modern English's "I Melt With You" plays. I used to kinda love that song, because it meant something between me and Pamela, my high school girlfriend...Nothing as romantic as a train platform and somewhat erotic cheese stretching out of our mouths, but it was good, you know?

Young lovers...An uppercrust couple and their teenaged goth daughter...Rival football fanatics...A balding older man, and death.

DEATH!!!!

Sitting there on a park bench, gooey sensual cheese hanging from his hooded void...

But let's get a tight shot of the meaty, stringy mess...The money shot, if you will...

Ahhhhh...

I loathe this commercial because of the use of "I Melt With You" - so fucking obvious and cliched, a song used a 1000 times in other lame and obvious ways in commercials and films and sitcoms...Because my memories of tongue kissing and hot chocolate at the Mill Pond warming house are fading away with every use of that song in the media...

But I fear this commercial because death is eating a Cheesy Beefy Melt™ on a park bench, and that is nothing other than Dada, and Dada destroys everything.

Cheesy Beefy Melt™ spells doom for us all!

Hotcha! Hank