"Bar-B-Que Babes"

Hardees. Home of the Monster Thickburger (which, by the way, I've never had in my entire life.) The chain is also well-known for its more provocative advertising campaigns, featuring several models including: Kate Upton, Sara Underwood, and Emily Ratajkowsk. My old roommate loves the commercials – so much that he had this picture as the desktop background on his computer:

The commercial I would like to share has never been aired on television. Hardees calls it The Director's Cut, which is apparently “Just too hot for TV.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsqUshEERvE&feature=related

This media is going to become a representations analysis paper for my Gender and Discourse class, which will examine the entire one minute and eights seconds. But for now, there are two themes I would like to briefly talk about from the commercial.

1. It sexualizes the two models. 

I don't think I need to explain that the women are a focus throughout the media, but to some degree it normalizes their behavior. At about 57 seconds, they are posed on bails of hay and the blonde is seductively wiping the Bar-B-Que sauce off the brunette's mouth. The commercial dialogue calls it “Bar-B-Que's best pair,” [between the beef and pork] which is ironically used as an innuendo to also implicate the two women. In fact, what is most interesting to me is that we don't know what is being advertised until a minute and two seconds into the commercial.

2. It portrays the male as a loser. 

It's unclear if the two men are supposed to be working as a team or independently – they're both wearing the same yellow shirts, so I would assume as a team... At any rate, they're both so distracted by the two women that nothing is cooking on their grill, let alone is it even lit? They can only view [the women] from afar and simultaneously take pictures with their cell phones.

There was also another commercial Hardees produced which actually WAS aired. It features a women at a drive-in movie who, while consuming a Southwest Patty Melt, becomes sexually aroused. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlLtnjSiTUE I think this commercial is just as a bad as the first one, and even worse in some details. Regardless, there is definitely a certain following to these commercials – and it will be interesting to further investigate the themes in more detail.