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Don’t Mess With A Classic

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. Now that the heat has broke a little bit, I’ve been back outside trying to keep the Kudzu cut back. I figure I can save a little money doing the yard work as far as my anklet will let me wander. The money that I don’t pay that “Landscape Specialist” is money in my pocket. I’m too durn poor to have a “specialist”.

While wrestling with the Kudzu, a Japanese import that is now synonymous with the South, I got to thinking about other things that are emblematic of the Southern way of life. Sweet tea that’s got so much sugar in it that the cavities in your teeth scream, “stop, no more, we can’t take it anymore”, would be the number one item on my list. Fried everything is next.

I swear I nearly swallowed my tongue when we went to a BBQ joint one time and they were serving fried dill pickles. Now honestly, I always thought they were supposed to give you dill pickles as part of your order. This enterprising bunch thought, “why don’t we batter ’em and fry ’em and we can charge $4.00 a pickle instead of just giving them away?” The pickles were right good, and they were selling a bunch of them, which proves the old Southern adage, everything is better battered and fried. There can be no better proof of the adage than okra. I can eat buckets of fried okra, and I can barely look at it stewed. Same thing squash. As a person whose personal BMI is slightly north of Hank Aaron’s lifetime batting average, I have been made aware that dietary choices play a factor. Fried should be at the bottom of my list of choices, but fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and cat’s head biscuits would be my choice for my last meal. 

My personal tastes were the springboard for a very successful business, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC as they prefer to be known today. To date I’ve received no royalties for developing the perfect menu, and I guess the folks at Pepsico think their chicken recipe means more than the items. The KFC folks are so secure in their knowledge of what the public wants that they’ve decided that they can just mix the meal up into one bowl and save on packaging the items individually. As unappetizing as that sounds to a person that loves the product, imagine how that plays with people who don’t like their food touching each other on the plate. There is no amount of explaining to these plate purists that the foods are all going to be touching each other soon. They know, they don’t care, right now, “get my cole slaw away from my mashed potatoes!”

As ill-conceived as the “bowl’ is, KFC has really topped themselves in trying to impersonate the Colonel. Colonel Harland Sanders is as much of an American icon as Coca Cola. Trying to parade someone out as creepy as Darrell Hammond is in the commercial below is as nauseating as the product he’s pushing, the bowl. Take a minute, play the commercial and see if you don’t agree, I’ll wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXB2MDaA0A4

 Makes you want to call your family inside doesn’t it? I know sometimes artists are given room to add their own interpretation to a role, but, please!!!!! I’m an old man, and this scares me, what does this commercial do to KFC’s target demographic?

In summation to all of you ad execs out there, sometimes all you have to do with a product is not screw it up. No “new coke”, no diet candies name Ayds, and definitely no creepy Colonel Sanders.

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