Of course I future-proofed myself against this Epic Skeletor Moneysupermarket advert back in January when I reacted to the news that the MoneySupermarket ‘EpicSomething’ adverts had been voted worst advert of the year.
Here’s what I wrote:
They’re all annoying, but none of them wear it so badly as the MoneySupermarket adverts, which also display a wholly undeserved smugness. The freak hit of the EpicStrut advert has spawned a series of total duds, carpet-bombing the airwaves like the pitiful follow-up singles of an already-forgotten X-Factor winner. It’s a zombie that’s still alive even though all its limbs have been hacked off.
If the people who make the MoneySupermarket adverts had read that paragraph and then created to advert simply to fulfil every naff characteristic highlighted in it, they couldn’t have done a better job.
But it’s even worse. The EpicSomething adverts were based on a genuinely original and dissonant advert – the guy walking down the street with his peculiar backside following 50 yards behind him. Every subsequent advert has been a pale, Xeroxed imitation that has truly shown up whoever comes with these adverts to be one-trick ponies. A builder, a security guard, some more builders, a fat woman. Because irony.
But the EpicSkeletor advert cross-pollinates this creative bankruptcy with another sign that they’re bereft of ideas over at Mother, the retained agency responsible for this stuff.
80s nostalgia is big online and it’s rarely possible to venture onto social media without someone posting a picture of Arthur from Eastenders and writing REMEMBER ARTHUR FROM EASTENDERS SHARE AND RETWEET IF YOU DO, followed by 50,000 Likes and lots of people tagging other people so they see the picture of Arthur from Eastenders.
So all-encompassing has this behaviour become that The Department of Work & Pensions is being closed and replaced with 25 people in Clapham employed to create 80s memes instead.
With a crushing inevitability that must surely have been whipped up by a lot of people holding their nose we get an EpicSomething mated to a BanalMeme in this Skeletor MoneySupermarket advert. And while the horrible Legobox estate house Skeletor lives in is minutely diverting there’s nothing else that’s remotely interesting about this advert – just a race-to-the-bottom clash of crap whose only intent is to raise a glimmer of brain activity in the terminally-short-of-imagination.
As a side note, a shoutout to the many, many websites on the internet that seem to exist solely to write in glowing terms about how amazing each new big advert is, even when they’re clearly not. Whether this is some form of arch self-reflexivity or just desperate self-interest I’m not sure but do seek them out for an insight into what it’s like to never have enjoyed a critical thought in your entire life.
• If you want to remind yourself of the actually-entertaining camp weirdness of Skeletor in the otherwise earnest Master of the Universe, take a look at this compilation of Skeletor’s best insults and imagine the best are being directed at whoever’s chiefly responsible for the Skeletor Moneysupermarket Advert.
• Skeletor is also a popular meme on social media thanks to his bitchy insults – another genuinely interesting aspect to the character completely ignored by the MoneySupermarket advert. He’s so popular there’s a handy meme generator that will allow you to easily create your own. Here’s my effort.