While the Denver Broncos walked away victoriously from the 2016 Super Bowl, nothing was more powerful than the "Puppy Monkey Baby" Mountain Dew Kickstart ad. There have been a number of groundbreaking, iconic Super Bowl ads over the years that have rocked viewers to their core. These commercials make the people unshakingly allegiant to a company and their product, and forever changed the medium of corporate advertising, but few have landed as hard as this game changer. Mountain Dew came to play with a nightmarish-yet-effective 30-second clip, fronted by one of the most incredibly bizarre mascots to ever grace the small screen. "Puppy Monkey Baby" is in the mostly untapped territory of surreal ads, but in its solitude, it stands powerful. With its unusual tone, hilarious and disturbing visuals, and placement during the year's most viewed sporting event, it stands tall as the greatest Super Bowl ad of all time.
What Are Super Bowl Commercials Capable Of?
Super Bowl commercials, by their nature, are constructed with the idea of capturing the world's attention and infatuating people with a company's product or service, typically in a feel good tone. They're some of the biggest and most expensive ads of the year, normally involving household names. This goes for the talent in front of and behind the camera. Big directors like Ridley Scott, David Fincher, and Zack Snyder have been a part of some of the event's most well known and highly acclaimed commercials. You can also almost always count on famous faces appearing too. Any time an actor, musician, or any kind of public figure appears in one of these ads, it helps create a greater sense of familiarity and likability towards a product that they might have been unfamiliar with in the first place. Try and act like you wouldn't be more excited about a bag of chips if Paul Rudd showed up in it. Paul Rudd makes everything better. Or if Ferris Bueller was selling you a car! Come on. You know this works.
Capitalizing on the 21st Century
You would think that purposefully off-putting your customers would be a terrible marketing strategy, but the folks at Mountain Dew know better. Creating a meme is a powerful thing in this day and age. If a company crafts the right image and puts it in an ad, once that ad is out there, social media users will take what they have made and essentially advertise their product for them tenfold. This gives companies the opportunity to set up a mascot for themselves faster than they might ever have been able to in the past. This is where the "Puppy Monkey Baby" commercial demolishes all of its competition.
The Events of "Puppy Monkey Baby"
The ad opens with four lazy losers who have decided that instead of going out, they're just going to stay in and chill. This establishing moment is captured with a muted color palette, bland apartment wallpaper, and very little in terms of set decor. Anything that does decorate their apartment has a design that feels just slightly unnatural, namely a speaker in the corner of their room. This all sets the table with an immediate feeling of normalcy, yet the idea that something sinister lurks in the ether. There's a bit of that Lynchian everyday darkness here, something that gets blown into the stratosphere mere moments later. This kind of tone doesn't come with most commercials, especially those played during a game as massive as this, but Mountain Dew had other plans.
Three seconds into this ad, the star of the show, Puppy Monkey Baby, comes bursting through a random cutout hole in the wall, perfectly sized for it, carrying an ice chest full of Mountain Dew Kickstarts. It immediately makes you wonder "what is that thing?", when really, with an intentionally sized hole such as that, you should be asking "how often does this happen?" At first, this little creature looks like a grotesque tower of miscellaneous body parts, which, it is, but upon further inspection, things become slightly clearer. It's got the lower half of a baby, diaper and all, a mid-section up to the neck of an incredibly hairy monkey, and the face of a pug. Its movements are so jagged and unnatural that it feels like some sort of mixture of puppetry and stop-motion animation. True nightmare fuel. There has never been a mascot like it before or since, but with an entrance as shocking as this, it's unlikely that you'll ever forget the little guy. Isn't that the point?
The creature starts repeating its own name, "Puppy Monkey Baby," over and over while shaking a baby rattle in these poor guys' faces. It even jumps on top of their living room coffee table, boogying down in front of them, just singing its little Puppy Monkey Baby heart out. The guys don't even mind, they just kick back and soak it all in, even seeming to enjoy its company a little. Puppy Monkey Baby then audaciously kicks its ice chest on to their laps, licks one guy's face, and they all each enjoy a nice Mountain Dew Kickstart as they move their dance party out into the hallway of their apartment building. The song picks up in the background, beat blaring, and an unforgettable meme is born. It's like watching the moon landing.
Where "Puppy Monkey Baby" Lands in the Conversation
In the history of Super Bowl commercials, there have been plenty of ads that were released to critical acclaim. Ridley Scott's "1984" Apple ad depicts a woman (Anya Major) who represents the original Macintosh, arriving to save the world from "Big Brother" (David Graham), a figure that represents conformity. The perfect commercial for the guy who had just come off of making Blade Runner. Since its release, it has universally gone on to be regarded as the greatest commercial of all time. "Hey Kid, Catch!" is a Coca-Cola ad from 1979's Super Bowl XIV in which a kid (Tommy Okon) follows the Pittsburgh Steelers' "Mean" Joe Greene as he limps to the locker room. The kid tells Greene that he's the greatest, offers him a Coke, and in exchange, Greene happily tosses his jersey over to the child saying "hey kid, catch!" It's a nice, heartwarming piece of corporate manipulation, making anyone and everyone want a Coke as soon as it's over. Well, "Puppy Monkey Baby" was met with a very mixed response, yet many commended it for embracing its own odd nature. The New Yorker dubbed it, not the best or worst commercial of the 2016 Super Bowl, but the weirdest. A job well done.
"Puppy Monkey Baby" is in the Pantheon
It's 2023, and like most other monsters, Puppy Monkey Baby continues to rear its head when you least expect it. The original 2016 Mountain Dew Kickstart ad got people talking about and buying its product, spawned endless memes that kept attention paid towards the commercial, and created a mascot that has continued to appear in commercials. It had the power to make people laugh, feel disgusted, and silence Super Bowl parties across the nation for 30 seconds as bystanders everywhere watched the ad unfold. Not only that, it made people want to buy a pack of Mountain Dew Kickstarts. How many other ads can claim to have successfully pulled all of these goals off? "Puppy Monkey Baby" is a surreal triumph in what 21st Century advertising is capable of, and deserves to be put into the pantheon of the greatest commercials of all time.