When, for better or worse, a film manages to dominate the global cultural consciousness to the degree of Avengers: Endgame, it’s only a matter of time until its iconography and most memorable lines are co-opted for other purposes. For the most part, this results in co-branding deals that give us shit like Yoda-headed mugs or barely-coherent food promos like Jurassic World-advertising peanut butter ice cream (the dinosaurs’ favorite flavor, we guess?).
But in some cases, like, say, this recent ad for a Mexican restaurant, something much better crawls forth from the Disney-dominated soup of 2019 pop culture—something that involves a lo-res version of Avengers’ Thanos selling delicious food by shaking his big purple butt around.
As spotted by @goingonajournie—a Twitter user whose name, as of this writing, at least, correctly proclaims that “Ben Shapiro Drinks Horse Piss”—the advertisement is for a Mexican restaurant called Takesabroso. It begins with a grainy snippet from a Spanish dub of Avengers: Endgame where Thanos announces “Yo soy inevitable” or “I am inevitable.” He snaps his fingers and then the clip shifts to a man Time identifies as Takesabroso owner Luis Vazquez saying, “Yo soy Takesabroso.” The background static of phone camera audio rushes in as Vazquez, face frozen in a local TV smile, snaps his own fingers, a blown-out explosion sound effect plays, and the commercial continues by showing some of Takesabroso’s menu items.
In a canny bit of editing by Jorge Lajud, close-ups of the dishes are accompanied by a loop of that dancing Thanos GIF in the bottom corner of the screen. Knowing that it’s hard to sell customers on eating at your restaurant with blurry shots of food and the kitchen staff alone, Thanos continuously swings his hips, crouches down, and gyrates his ass in order to entice diners. Toward the end, a second dancing Thanos appears to mirror the first, doubling the viewers’ desire for a trip to Takesabroso.
It’s unlikely that Disney has cleared this commercial but we’d argue that it must be protected under fair use. Takesabroso isn’t using footage and characters from Avengers: Endgame just to sell its food; like all great pop artists, it’s forcing us to question our relationship with the products of modern culture by reconfiguring recognizable imagery in strange new ways. In this ad (and others), they’ve more than succeeded.
[via Time]
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