Wilkins and Wontkins Ads
Wilkins and Wontkins
In 1957, as I explained yesterday, Jim and his partner, Jane, were approached by the Wilkins Coffee Co., a local brand in Maryland, to produce humorous commercials for them, and Jim responded with a series of ads that is pretty jaw-dropping even today. For the ads, Jim created two new Muppets: the skinny, tall, cheerful Wilkins, and the squat, short, perpetually unpleasant Wontkins, the basic gist being that Wilkins loves Wilkins coffee–he WILL drink it!–and Wontkins doesn’t–he WON’T drink it–but Wilkins won’t let that slide and so instead inflicts numerous, increasingly imaginative tortures on Wontkins for daring to refuse a cup of the precious caffeinated liquid gold.
And when I say “torture,” I mean torture, from being shot to blown up to stabbed to beaten up to run over with a train, car, or wagon to being thrown out of a tree, etc. etc. etc. Henson’s earliest and ingenious slogan was “Drink Wilkins coffee…or else!” Can you imagine this being used in an ad today? Even just the idea of a character in a commercial flat-out refusing to use a product seems shocking enough, let alone that character then being coerced into doing so by cartoonishly twisted means.
And yet the magic of the ads is how delightful they are. In many ways, viewed today, they give us our first glimpse of the zany anarchy that runs throughout the Muppets’ best work. Jim was notorious for treating his characters and puppets without kid gloves. He loved roughing them up, so to speak, and while perhaps some of the gun humor would be a bit out of place not only today but in his later Muppet canon, as well, cartoony explosions would become a Muppet staple, particularly in the form of Crazy Harry. And aside from that, Jim manages to make what would seem to be inherently mean actions feel not mean due to the good-natured smile you can sense hiding behind it all. There’s an odd sense of innocence to it. More often than not, these are the sorts of over-the-top threats one child would make to another in make-believe, not serious depictions of Guantanamo-Bay-type torture. Think a slightly darker but no less whimsical Green Eggs and Ham. Also, the soft, cuddliness of the characters’ exteriors helps soften the tone, as well.
Wilkins brands Wontkins.
Additionally, lighthearted wordplay ranging from very clever to just plain silly to often both goes hand-in-hand with the violent actions, which further underlines the underlying wink. Quite a few times while watching a 15-minute-long set of around 100 of these ads, I was practically thrown by how smart and funny one of Wilkins’ lines after harming Wontkins would be, bringing the accompanying slapstick to a whole new level. For example, Wilkins knocks Wontkins out of a tree when he says he won’t drink the coffee, and says, “It’s spring, and the nuts are beginning to fall”! In a similar one, Wilkins and Wontkins are construction workers and after Wilkins pushes Wontkins off the scaffolding, he proudly announces, “Now all of our workers drink Wilkins”!
Another time, both of them are being brewed in a giant cup of Wilkins coffee by a cannibal tribe, and Wilkins is ecstatic that Wontkins has finally “joined [him] in a cup of Wilkins”! And in one of my favorites, Wontkins jumps off of a high diving board and Wilkins moves the bucket of water so Wontkins lands on the ground instead, telling him that “You miss a lot when you don’t drink Wilkins!” In one Wilkins’ head literally flies off his body because–you guessed it–he’s lost his head over Wilkins. These quick sorts of gags reminded me a great deal of a lot of the early Muppet Show sketches, such as “At the Dance,” where various dancing partners would deliver puns to each other back and forth, and the Talking Houses bits, which were also practically comic-strip-length. Remarkably, all of the Wilkins coffee ads are only 8 seconds long, which makes the crazy little worlds Henson manages to invent in them even more impressive.