Kids and grown-ups love it so. Of course I’m referring to the Happy World of Haribo! It unites young and old. Children get a hit of sour sugar; adults regress to a time when they weren’t pressured to eat poached almonds instead. This plastic idyll, where we wallow in slow dental suicide, is evoked in Haribo’s new promo by a comic device that previously lent charm to Creature Comforts, Drunk History and the IRA: incongruous dubbing.
On a recreation ground, middle-class men are ruggering heartily when a scrum-half passes round the Tangfastics. But when he talks, a child’s voice plays: “What does it taste like?” Haribo has evidently gathered a focus group of minors and exchanged gelatin shapes for monetisably cute descriptions of tang hitting tongue. “Like fire and a liddle bit of eeeleck-drissity!” mimes a man-bunned beardster, to the sound of a boy jazzed on malic acid.
“My one tasted of cwaziness and, like, the fings in the world,” asserts some git in a headband, mouthing the words of a child whose blameless pancreas is undergoing a colossal glucose bombardment. “You’ve got Tangfastic face!” says the scrum-half to his bald fwend. All the happy grown-up kids smile. You can almost see their gums.
