Today we're reminded that the singing Quiznos rats were real and not a collective fever dream
There you are. It’s 2003. You’re chilling on your parent’s couch, flipping channels because you don’t have the luxury of Netflix or Hulu. You settle on a show, hunker down, and, all of a sudden, you’re confronted with the creepiest creatures you’ve ever seen, singing and playing guitar in front of a Quiznos. “This cannot be an ad,” you think. “I am dreaming.” You maintained that illusion for years, but nothing stays buried in the online age. Yes, the Quiznos rats are back.
Thanks to Twitter, these things—which were Spongmonkeys, not rats, though they look like sleep paralysis demons had a baby with the “Hamster Dance” hamsters—have resurfaced, with one Twitter user opining that “millennials don’t own homes because this quiznos commercial put a hex on us as children.” They’re right. You should feel a little hexed. Everything is worse since we first encountered these monsters.
Quiznos is spiraling financially these days, clearly because they gave up on meme-like marketing long before anyone could learn to process it. The brands would kill for this sort of thing now.