Recently, I saw this tweet from Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman and generally a famous person, and I was like, huh?
Then I started Googling and remembered that in January, Mr. Peanut DIED. It was in the news.
It happened in a Twitter video, and possibly elsewhere: He and his nameless friends got in a car accident, and ended up all dangling from a single branch over the (or maybe just a) Grand Canyon. The branch started breaking under their weight, so Mr. Peanut heroically/suicidally jumped to his death to save his friends.
It’s sort of hard to buy into a world where Mr. Peanut didn’t die by being eaten, as he is a food, but okay.
This kicked off a very tonally strange year in peanut advertising (and public health).
Next up: A Super Bowl ad set at Mr. Peanut’s funeral! Here, Mr. Peanut gets surprise-reborn as Baby Nut, a smaller, smoother peanut. The baby just sort of… geysers up out of Mr. Peanut’s grave, riding on a chariot-plant. He caws like a bird and asks for his monocle. His irises are bigger than his hands. His whole body could fit in his hat. I can’t tell if this ad is a full cartoon or a Space Jam-style mishmash of cartoon and regular, but whatever it is, the vibe is weird.
When the ground barfs up Baby Nut, the funeral attendees — Mr. Clean, the Kool Aid pitcher, and assorted suits — clap and hold him aloft Lion King-style. It’s the circle of life? It’s the boy who lived?
It’s a pandemic! A month or so after this ad, coronavirus shut everything down, and Baby Nut lost his (tenuous) foothold in the discourse. Until this month, when Baby Nut reemerged into the public eye as 21-year-old Peanut Jr. He is, chronologically speaking, six months old, and he wants to party.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg wasn’t the only person who low-key lost his mind over Peanut Jr. No one likes Peanut Jr. He’s creepy; he’s drinking too much; he makes no sense.
I personally laughed at this topical tweet:
But overall, I get the distaste! This whole ~concept~ feels like Planters is slapping it together as they go. It’s like Lost, but without a good starting premise. (Full disclosure: I never watched Lost.) I mean, if this nut keeps living this fast, he’s going to start dying all the time, with diminishing emotional returns each time.
What’s the point? We already have enough commentary on time loops: Groundhog Day, Russian Doll, Palm Springs. And those are (probably) all better (haven’t seen Palm Springs), because they’re about people learning to connect and build relationships through a series of forced do-overs. That’s a great plot! The olde “The universe wants you to love” plot.
But mascots are mostly alone. I bet Planters paid a lot of money to get Mr. Clean to appear at Mr. Peanut’s funeral — and Baby Nut / Peanut Jr. doesn’t even have parents. His “dad” is a vine. After his funeral-slash-birth, he spent his whole childhood alone in one room. He never left and no one visited him — not even his friends whose lives he saved when he died!
Now he’s “old” “enough” to go to the bar, but he’s still alone. It’s empty, and the bartender is just a disembodied hand.
It’s all so boring. Being alone forever is the opposite of a plot or a good time — it just makes me think about child neglect and solitary confinement. It’s no wonder Mr. Peanut is drinking heavily and aging fast; they’re the only two things he has to do in his mascot fishbowl!
The whole campaign just feels like proof that mascots shouldn’t star in promotional webseries. They’re bad protagonists. The whole point of mascots is that they live static, plotless lives; they don’t age, or switch outfits. They make your peanuts (or whatever) feel familiar. They don’t grow or change or die.
Even Planters knows this. They “killed” Mr. Peanut, but I Googled around, and he’s still on their peanut packaging. He fell in his video ravine, but for most intents and purposes, he’s alive and at work.