Beauty in the Beast? Sex, animals & orange soda: A perfect combo

by AdFool | January 21, 2011 at 03:45 pm

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What is it with Orangina and their bizarro fixation on animals? A few years back I went to town on an ad they had run showcasing a decidedly sex-centric orgy of animated animals exhibiting some way-too human motivations. It was just weird – period. Since then, I have spent the last few years attempting to purge its lurid burn marks from my ad-obsessed mind. And even in the absence of professional analysis, I have been fairly successful indeed. No, you cannot ever fully unsee something already seen but I can report that I now sleep soundly without seeing Octo-human pole dancers shakin’ their groove “thangs” at my crotch (thank you warm milk, cookies and Quaaludes).

As you’d expect, Orangina cares little for any issues I might have and soldiered on, continuing to put out further ads featuring their uncomfortably human animals existing in the world I thought I knew. I missed them at the time, thankfully keeping my self-administered rehabilitation on-track - until now that is.

For whatever reason, Orangina has re-surfaced with yet another incarnation of their “amazing animals” but managed to “up the creepy” even more. I don’t know if this continuation is the result of some long-term ad agreement signed by someone’s idiot nephew or a larger humano-beasty cultural initiative being promoted by a man-beast faction within Orangina’s corporate office. Whatever the case, it’s simply got to stop.

The new ad features Orangina’s (by now) familiar group of pseudo-beasts “satirizing” common commercial tropes, from the drinking of milk to the using of deodorant to the (ahem) necessity of a good douche. The “hook” is that the products in question have been substituted for Orangina – and that no humans actually using them. In the spot we see a horse-women washing her hair in Orangina, a Cockney-accented man-lizard treating his acne with an Orangina spot-wash, a (literally) sexy beast washing her ride with Orangina Paris Hilton - style and even one decidedly fabulous cougar using his orange drink as after shave with rather homeorotic results. There are animal parents with human kids and a goat-woman washing her kitchen floors. A bear-man spritzes his pits and a giraffe-lady hangs out her laundry – all made better and fresher through the use of Orangina.

The spot is about as “out there” as it gets, suggesting several tons of things but never really “saying” anything. What ties this frightening fable up tight as a bow is the creepy ending where we appear to finally step back from the oh-so odd world of Orangina-themed advertisement. Outside the lunacy we come face to face with what can only be described as the target audience of this strange new world: a slightly dishevelled dude with a red smear on his face watching TV on the couch, snuggled up tight and cozy to a sheep wearing red lipstick. That is just……it was so……I can’t even……..ewwww!!!

Look, at some point even hip irony or razor-sharp satire finally crosses the line, becoming a form of tacit promotion for a specific world-view. You can only push things so far before you find yourself comin’ ‘round the other side of the mountain. Is this twisted reality some sort of new world order Orangina is pining for? Is it what I’m now expected to be dreaming of when I take a pull from their bulbous handful of a bottle? Lord I hope not. The whole realm is so deviant. There has got to be something seriously wrong with someone, somewhere inside this freaky campaign.

Yes, I get that taboo-shattering is big business these days, and that any taboos still remaining are on life-support at best. And it is hammered home repeatedly that should you ever find yourself offended by anything at all you are probably masking some deep-seated need to engage in whatever “perversion” you claim to abhor, but is it true? Could I really be guilty of trying to tamp down some long-held bestiality fetish that Orangina’s images are simply giving rise to? Do I posses some dark secret a better man would be more open and proud to share? I doubt it. Contrary to popular belief (and Charlie Sheen) not every human impulse is good, pure and begging to be shared with all. Some ideas are just stupid or inappropriate. Personally, I don’t think it’s that hard to gin up a few reasons why sex with animals isn’t the most structurally positive thing humanity might consider. Maybe Orangina best leave the fable-flogging to Disney as they have a few things they need to get started on immediately, like proper medication or a 12-step program of some kind.

It’s weird enough that Orangina is willing to compare their bright orange soda to cleaners and general hygiene products but to wrap the entire package in some quasi-transparent cloak of suggested bestiality is friggen sick. We’re way past out of the box thinking here. This Orangina ad takes out-of-the-box thinking down the street, around the corner and dumps it into a urine-soaked storm drain. Either an ad like this is nutbar to the tenth power or it’s not. If it’s not, then I’m clearly the one repressing.