While it’s not clear to us, after years of intermittently covering commercials as part of our regular Newswire beat, whether advertising can be art, we’ve come to the conclusion that it definitely can be weird. Sometimes so weird that there’s not a whole lot you can do with it except point at it and go, “Hey, this is pretty messed up, isn’t it?” Like, say, the fact that the marketing team for the General Mills corporation released a 7.5-minute horror film onto the YouTube channel for its Gushers-brand fruit snacks today, featuring Bradley Whitford being menaced by a guy with a strawberry for a head as part of an extended reference to that one creepy commercial from the ’90s where the children’s heads turn into CGI fruit.
This is FruitHead, apparently the product of Lonely Island and I Think You Should Leave collaborator Mike Diva, working with writers Ian Reichenthal and Matt Sorrell and also, again, multiple Emmy-owner Bradley Whitford. The short stars Whitford as the guy who directed that one Gushers commercial, who apparently decided to use dark magic to actually turn a child actor’s head into a piece of fruit to fulfill his artistic ambitions. (The following punchline, where the guy finds out CG exists, is as close as FruitHead ever gets to winking at its own absurdity.) Retribution swiftly arrives, in a deliciously juice-filled form.
Are we dumb for kind of liking this thing? (Say it all in chorus: “YES!”) It’s blatant manipulation, tapping into an easy wellspring of childhood memories in service of a pretty one-note joke. But the whole thing is a competently shot parody of “elevated horror” style, the prosthetics look better than you might expect, and the whole thing carries a vibe of such deliberate “give us some money and we’ll come back with the weirdest thing you ever post to your YouTube” oddness that we can’t help but kind of enjoy the fact that it exists.
And, like, fuck us, but we could kind of go for a pack of Gushers right now, so good job, bizarre nostalgia-tinged horror short where Bradley Whitford is tortured by a talking strawberry. Mission accomplished!
