For years, advertisers have been trying their damnedest to make us forget that most meat products we eat once had a face, a family, a life. Cow? No, this is a burger. Lamb? No, this is a chop. Horse? No, this is a crispy pancake. So it’s quite counterintuitive that Mini Cheddars – a product that doesn’t actually, as far as we know, contain meat – now want to be regarded as living, breathing entities. Ones that… sing?
In the terrifying new advert, three sofa-dwelling lads crack open some packets of Mini Cheddars, only for the bags to miraculously come to life and belt out the chorus to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart. The song is so beautiful, it puts our three heroes, inexplicably sitting on the sofa in a line to silently eat a cheese-based crisp alternative, into a trance. Even the nagging mum/girlfriend/non-Mini Cheddar consumer in the kitchen behind them can’t penetrate their fugue state.
And then, as soon the song is over, the Mini Cheddar is eaten: its existence, its life, ended in one violent crunch. Is this a metaphor for life? As in, we’ll all have one brief moment of glory, of celebration, of beauty and hope, burning bright like a dying sun before our lights will be extinguished for ever, as we collapse into a black hole? The black hole being a… mouth? Is that it? Is the message: if you love something, don’t set it free, instead, eat it? Or is it just a snack product ironically using a beloved 80s song to lodge itself firmly in our simple minds? It’s the first one. It’s definitely the first one.
