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Ad Report Card: Minute Maid Makes You Gay! (Happy, That Is)

By Rob Walker
Posted Monday, May 7, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET

Some months ago the Ad Report Card devoted not one but two installments to commercials that turned on references (oblique or otherwise) to homosexuality. Often the reference served as a punch line of one sort or another, and in some cases I was critical of the way in which this or that advertiser used gayness as a joke. Responses were many and spirited. Some suggested I was being ridiculous, seeing gay themes where there were none. Others, some claiming to have inside knowledge of the ad business, argued I was naïve, overlooking the benign influence of gays who work in "ad creative." I have no way of checking the latter claim, but both critiques came to mind when a couple of people e-mailed me recently about a Minute Maid orange juice spot featuring Popeye and Bluto. The ad is part of a series, the theme of which is that drinking Minute Maid makes you gay.

As in happy.

Now, some observers have suggested that, in addition to promoting the happy-making power of Minute Maid, the Popeye spot might just be an example of "gay vague," along with another commercial that I haven't seen, which is airing in Europe—read this for more. You can see the spots in the U.S. campaign below: the Popeye one, another featuring Bobby Knight, a third about a "helpful hubby," and a fourth centered on a suspiciously cheerful lunch lady. My main focus is the Popeye spot.

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Popeye
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The ad: Here they are, two of the most famous rivals in cartoondom, playing happily together on a swing and then a seesaw. Popeye good-naturedly pats sand over Bluto on the beach; sappy pal music plays. The pair gets matching "Buddies for Life" tattoos. What's going on? An announcer says cheerfully: "Somebody had their Minute Maid this morning. It takes a minute, but the feeling"—the unbridled joy and affection we're seeing here—"lasts all day." Popeye and Bluto pedal along on a tandem bike. Olive Oyl waves ("Oh boys!" she calls), but they ride straight past, blithely ignoring the object of their traditional erotic rivalry.

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Coach
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Hmmm. Perhaps it's ridiculous of me to ask, but what exactly is it that's preventing these Minute-Maid-drunk boys from including Olive in their fun? On the other hand, what is it that makes it inevitable that almost any prominent male pair is inevitably subject to some kind of what-if-they-were-gay speculation—good-natured, homophobic, or somewhere in between? (Perhaps you've heard spurious gossip about the relationship between Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Or read my Slate colleague David Plotz's exploration of the fan fiction subgenre devoted to the imagined couplings of Kirk and Spock, among others. Or recall a New Yorker cartoon that one of my correspondents remembers, featuring none other than Popeye and Bluto holding hands, having finally figured out "where all that anger was coming from.")

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Bed
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What about the other Minute Maid spots? You could say that they all play it straight. Hothead basketball coach Bobby Knight, having had his Minute Maid, coddles and dotes on his players, bursting into the post-game locker room to ask "Who wants a treat?" A spot featuring a surprisingly helpful husband has him forsaking football to bustle around neatening things up, heading off to "market," and setting his iron for chiffon. A chipper lunch lady minces through a school cafeteria asking, "Who wants tiramisu?"

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School
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Anyway, subtext or no subtext, this is a pretty good campaign. All the spots, but especially the Popeye one, are attention-getting and make a clear case for the alleged powers of a morning glass of Minute Maid. The helpful hubby installment is the weakest, but the Bobby Knight one is hilarious. Mushing together grades for all four into one composite score, I'd give them a solid B. When I watch these ads, I feel … happy.

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Rob Walker writes the Ad Report Card for Slate.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: More Gay Vague moments from Natalie Hope McDonald here; and a few more adverts here. If gay themed adverts interest you, then on no account miss the link to the Commercial Closet website, below: it makes for fascinating reading. The Outlaw Texas Red takes up several themes here, including the rather cruel Olive Oyl-bashing: does no Fray poster have a good word for her? Find her attractive? It's not like Popeye or Bluto were such great catches, if we may say so.

There is a dramatic confession here, and naturally we believe every word. Another thread took a similar line, from show tunes to window treatments, and one poster summed up: "I thought I was preventing cancer. Now I find myself picking out much more colorful shirts. Is this some kind of commie plot, or what?"]



The question should not be, "why are Bluto and Popeye not paying attention to Olive Oyl?" but instead should be, "why did these two men ever give her the time of day in the first place?" I never understood the attraction.

--Kurt

(To reply, click here.)


How could the author of "Moneybox" not see this gay-themed orange juice ad campaign for what it clearly is?

They are apologizing to the gay community for Anita Bryant. Anita (for those too young to know) was a singer with a sunny wholesome image who repped for the OJ people for a number of years until her extracurricular activities began to interfere with her juice hawking duties. She actively campaigned against gay rights, not realizing that the tide of PC was turning against her. She was fired, but apparently, this did not fully atone for the shabby treatment of gays by the squeezed citrus industry. They felt that portraying the butchest of cartoon characters as, shall we say, booty buddies, would be the only sufficient form of apology that would heal the hurting.

But my real objection to this article is the reference to Olive Oyl as "the object of their traditional erotic rivalry." The word "erotic" should not be included in any sentence together with Olive Oyl.

--Texwiz

(To reply, click here.)


 I spoke with the creative director of the campaign, a straight man, and he was pleasantly surprised to hear that there was a gay reading that he says he did not intend.

But there's another Minute Maid ad running in Europe that shows an Army guy who leaves his suburban home for work and before jumping into a Jeep, a convertible drives by with the Village People and the song "In the Navy" playing--he "goes gay" by jumping in the car with them instead!

Check both commercials and hundreds more with gay themes, along with my own story on these ads, at the Commercial Closet website.

--Mike Wilke
 (Executive Director, Commercial Closet.)

(To reply, click here.)

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