It seems that lovable fata*s-turned-skinny-white-guy Jared isn’t cutting it anymore. He’s tired, played out. Sooo 2006, as it were.
Without Jared, how is Subway supposed to sell sandwiches? By playing on people’s deep seated fear of all things geeky, digital, and holy, of course!
The above commercial depicts some 7-year-old gamer as a lazy, compulsive eater playing some Pac-Man knockoff called Snakka, the point of which seems to be to eat as much junk food as possible. The character dies by getting stuck in an opening while trying to eat the bonus sundaes.
Cue the dialogue: “What kind of eating habits are your kids learning?” Real subtle, Subway. Not only does the commercial buy into the fat, lonely white guy gamer stereotype, but implies that children could somehow base their diet on a video game. I remember finding whole chickens in Wolfenstein, and I can assure you that if I ever find poultry laying around a dirty jail cell, I’d be on it like Anna Nicole on TrimSpa. Or not.
The one redeeming quality of the commerical is the clever use of Dantean imagery. Check it: just as the player makes that final push towards gluttony, he gets caught in the whole. He is physically and metaphorically weighed down by his gluttony, just like the Gluttons in the Third Circle of Dante’s Inferno. That one’s for you, Linde.
So, clever marketing ploy that soccer moms will get into, or cruel exploitation of little gamers with kinky afros?
