I really dislike advertising mascots who belong to the group that is being eaten. There's something grotesque and ghoulish about sentient beings proclaiming how good they taste after being killed and cooked.
The scariest of the bunch are the M&Ms, sentient, three-foot tall versions of the candy, three male (red, yellow, blue), two female (green, brown).
They are eager to participate in human society. But every time they make friends, get jobs, get invited to parties, or in this case, go on a date with William Levy (top photo), they discover that their human "friends" actually want to eat them.
The M&Ms follow stereotypic gender roles, with females distinguished from males by their eyelashes and lipstick. And there are occasional homophobic jokes, as in this commercial when the Orange M&M (Eric Kirchberger) discovers that a pretzel person will be going
inside him.
But there has been at least one M&M commercial with a bisexual text. The Brown M&M (Vanessa Williams) is at a party, when her friend warns that she should stay away from the cruising Kristen: "She'll devour you!"
The savvy Brown M&M hooks Kristen up with the Red M&M (Billy West), who is shown being dragged off to what he hopes is a night of sex.
So the Brown M&M is into both men and women. So is Kristen. Or maybe she just has a fetish for pieces of sentient candy.
I don't know if Rob Pruitt, who plays the Blue M&M, is the same Rob Pruitt as the artist, but the artist (the naked one with the panda on his penis) is gay.
See also:
Scary, Heterosexist Ads of the 1960s.
