The Worst Adverts In The World… Ever! #3 “Smoother Than The Cream In A Twinkie, Word Up!”

Well, we’re not having much luck finding any of these on YouTube, it seems, so if you don’t remember them you’ll just have to have a bit of faith that they actually did exist. And also be grateful that you’re not having to experience them for yourselves…

Today’s early nineties offering saw Wrangler Jeans make yet another attempt to tackle their perrennial image problem by reaching out to a rather strange combination of leftover ’arty’ pretentious types, rave-conscious teens and minor lawbreakers. On that grainy black and white filmstock so beloved of late eighties film school graduates, though hilarously now evoking the image of nothing more ‘artistic’ than Nick Kamen, a bloke carefully decked out to resemble LL Cool J steps into a suspiciously professional-looking radio studio, and starts rapping into one of those ancient Ye Olde BBC microphones about how exciting it is being on the air as a one-man pirate radio station. ‘Cops’ shot at a weird angle from below start to frown. Bloke says something about his ‘girl’ and how he’d ‘like to… uhhh’; cut to said ‘Girl’, giggling into her hand with a ‘he’s so fresh!’ expression on her face. Cops close in. Bloke keeps rapping. Cops barge down the door, only to find that the rapping has seamlessly (not just in terms of beat, but also sound quality) crossfaded with the bloke’s voice as recorded on the world’s smallest reel-to-reel tape recorded, suspended in front of the BBC mike, concluding with a taunting boast about being “smoother than the cream in a Twinkie, word up!”.

Even aside from the fact that UK-based potential denim purchasers had virtually no knowledge of the cream in a Twinkie full stop, let alone its position on the universally accepted scale of smoothness, this was scarcely what was needed after years of being hammered by Levi’s and their deft use of fifties iconography, ancient soul records, and that girl with a nice arse stealing some jeans on a beach to the sound of Bad Company. Still, it probably shifted more units than ‘…wears Pepe?’.

NEXT TIME… militaristic indoctrination and satires of British Rail…