The Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chocobot Hour

This year, the famous superbowl ads had one particularly notable inclusion.


Even now I can’t shake a feeling of deep-seated disgust.

Mr Burns is broke and sad, but his life is made whole again when the friendly Apu gives him a coke. He discovers that all you need to be happy is a caffeine-riddled high-fructose corn syrup with 8 teaspoons of sugar per can, and the entire town is lovingly united by the Coca Cola spirit. This is the sell-out of all sell-outs. This an insult to everything The Simpsons ever was. I even feel a little betrayed. Maybe, I desperately hopes, the writers where trying to be ironic, or at least aware of the irony. But that doesn’t mean that everyone watching will be. That doesn’t mean that coke sales won’t substantially increase. That doesn’t mean that product placement and exploitation in Springfield won’t get even more shameless and rampant.

But why does it matter?

We live in a world where a contrived mass media exists primarily to make us buy crap.

It’s easy to forget that the only reason free to air tv exists is to encourage us to make purchases. The shows are filler between the commercials. To think that any one of us is not effected by advertising is deluded. We are; otherwise the mass media wouldnot exist. We can’t just “escape” it by listening to public radio and watching the ABC; you’d have to go a long way or shut your eyes very tightly for a logo or advertisement not to be in plain sight. There is no escape. Through advertising, corporations have a direct fast-track to our brains. When we’re not buying the message (Allianz Car Insurance or a Double Bacon Cheese Burger Stunner Meal Deal) we’re buying the media itself. A foxtel family pack or today’s tabloid rag. Either way, we’re told what to buy, what to read, what to know, what to read, what to feel and what to think.

That’s why the Simpsons is so refreshing. In it’s golden years, the show it was a satirical masterpiece. It constantly lampooned the powers that be, held a piercing mirror up to society, told us to think for ourselves, instilled in it’s multinational audience a healthy mistrust of authority and attacked and subverted popular culture by becoming firmly entrenched in it. Just look at even a handful of the more minor Springfieldianites, especially those involved in the media.

Troy McClure (you may remember him from such celebrity funerals as “Andre The Giant, We Hardly Knew Ye” and “Shemp Howard, Today We Mourn A Stooge”) is a grotesque portrait of the vapid notion of the celebrity. Kent Brockman is a grinning manifestation of trite, sensationalist journalism. His question “Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?” could be straight off Today Tonight or A Current Affair. Krusty "There's nothing better than a cigar lit with a hundred dollar bill!" the Klown is oozing with the two-faced. exploitive, money hungry cynicism that powers the entertainment industry and the jaded hackery that comes with it. Lindsay Naegle (that executive woman who works for everyone with the short blond hair) is a glossy, slick-talking, buzzword spouting picture perfect parody of modern Public Relations and Corporate Bullshit. You’ve heard the expression “let’s get busy”? Well, this is a corporate shill who gets “biz-zay!” Consistently and thoroughly. Mr Burns… well, he likes Coke™.

For me, this ad is evidence that all that’s all over. The Simpson’s now nothing more than a gimmick for advertisers who can afford it and a flagship cash-cow for Fox, the most contemptibly biased and unethical televison network in the developed world. (And not just because of “Worlds Funniest Tornadoes and the fact that they “Own a chemical weapons plant in Syria.” But I’ll leave my Fox ranting for another time.) Even Mickey goddamn Mouse would have more sincerity than to appear on primetime quaffing a bottle of coke.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Commercial products have always been a part of the Simpsons. Look at the endless merchandise that the show has spawned from it’s very inception: t-shirts, pencil cases, dolls, figurines, watches, cereal, toys, boardgames, cards, pez-dispensers, pasta beer and more, but they’ve always been quick to attack this on the show itself – “A Simpson would never lend their name to an inferior product”. It’s also not the first time there’s a been a commercial team up; The Simpsons have been used to sell Mcdonalds, 7/11 (when the long-awaited and mediocre movie was released, a bunch of 7/11s in America were converted into Kwikimarts. Whether or not the squishees were laced with opium is unknown) and probably wouldn’t exist today if it wasn’t for Bart being mascot for the awful candy Butterfingers in the early 90s. “Even the fire doesn’t want them." But this unholy union with coca cola just seems a step too far. Never before have the characters – any characters – been so shamelessly whored in a context so similar to the actually show.

The farce is made even more audacious by the fact that the main character in the ad is Mr C. Montgomery Burns, once the most diabolical parody of corporate greed ever to lurk our screens. An amalgm of Rupert Mordoch, Ebeneezer Scrooge, Charles Foster Kane, a geriatric Victorian-era robber baron, some kind of mummified vulture and Count Dracula. Mr Burns, with his loathing of workers, contempt for the environment, “unrequested fission surpluses” and megalomaniacal corporate tyranny stood for everything wrong with the business end of consumerism. It's interesting to note that in recent seasons, almost every other character on the show has been increasingly exaggerated, stereotyped and had all nuance and subtlety sucked out of them – or as it’s been labelled on the internet, “Flanderised”. Burns on the other hand has actually been toned down to a largely harmless old man, something that even his voice actor Harry Shearer has acknowledged and criticised. It’s impossible to imagine the current Mr Burns blocking out the sun or pointing a gun at an 8 year old. More often than not he now serves as the foil for Smither’s once funny homosexuality, which has even been flanderised itself. But in earlier seasons, before he was diluted to an extra with less personality and airtime than Gil, Mr Burns was easily the most the ingeniously, hilariously and scathingly concocted creation in Springfield outside The Simpsons family itself, and arguably within it as well.

It’s so bitterly fitting that Burns should be the star of The Simpson’s big sell-out to unabashed corporate endorsement. Let's all go to the lobby and get ourselves a snack. For those of you still touched by the Coca Cola Spirit, here’s a few facts.

Coca Cola generally doesn’t bottle and distribute it’s own products. Instead, it contracts and strictly oversees private bottling companies, often partially owned by coke, to do it for them. For example, in Australia coke products are distributed by a company called Coca Cola Amatil. In Columbia, a company called Panamerican Beverages, or Panamco, bottles and distributes coke. Because of poor working conditions, workers at the Panamco bottling plant formed a union. It’s undisputed that from 1994 to 2002 Panamco hired paramilitariy groups to attack, torture, kidnap and kill union leaders in order to drive down wages, leading to nine murders and at least 170 other “major human rights violations”. The Coca Cola company, with their tight control of the plant’s management was at best an accessory and worst totally complicit in these murders. An lawsuit was held against the Coca Cola Company by the union and human rights groups, but was dismissed because Columbia is outside US jurisdiction.

Other Coca Cola human rights violations include repeatedly-found high levels of carcinogenic pesticide residue found in coke products in India, with products containing 30 times the level of presticide residues permitted under European union regulations. They've also been attacked for the hijacking water supplies in regions of India, leading to water contamination and drought, and the suspected assassination of a community leader leading a protest against the opening of a Coca Cola bottling plant. Coca Cola has also been succesfully sued for racial discrimination in their hiring practices, actively targeting children in advertising and contributing to childhood obesity and even having board members with close ties and sympathies to Nazi Germany prior to branding themselves as the american "beverage of choice" after Pearl Harbour. Coca Cola’s history is also riddled with a litany of other unethical practices.

That’s not to say that they’re that much worse than the competitors, just that the attractive, fun-loving, happiness-in-a-bottle community image that coke tries to put across is a particularly insidious and false one. I find it deeply disheartening that this image is being endorsed and built up by a show which used to stand for exactly the opposite and once subverted, rather than reinforced, the commercially-constructed status quo.

The Simpsons just proved that it’s satirical edge has long since rusted, that it’s sell out is totally complete and that it should have been axed years ago. I think it's time for the whole show to die on the way back to it's home planet and never be seen again.

Sorry Coke™.