Omega Mart advertises time-traveling ham, nut-free peanuts in series of perfectly normal commercials
Earlier this year, we looked at a commercial for Omega Mart that featured a self-replicating Willie Nelson deepfake spreading across the faces of shoppers at an art installation/grocery store. This was only a shred of what was to come when director Mike Diva and Meow Wolf, the art collective responsible for the surrealist store’s creation, started releasing other advertisements for the project.
A collection of the commercials released on Diva’s YouTube channel offers the best way to understand what we’re talking about.
The spirit of Omega Mart, a Las Vegas installation that allows visitors to “explore an extraordinary supermarket that bursts into surreal worlds and unexpected landscapes,” is captured here in ads for everything from orange cola and “refreshing Zalg” to everyone’s favorite Halloween treats, “nut-free salted peanuts” and the threatening eldritch cube, Glorbox. Many of the commercials have a great “weird ’90s” aesthetic, with Diva leaning into the giddy joy of seeing CGI effects turning a honey-glazed ham into a cyborg pig or implanting a wide, rolling eye into a lemon.
Aside from the collection above, Meow Wolf has released other ads that promote Omega Mart’s “butter-scented air freshener,” DVD cases of “collector’s edition sliced meat,” and its“root beer-flavored vape juice-flavored root beer.” (The last of these items blew up on Twitter last month when a photo from the installation was mistaken for being an actual product.) There’s also a segment that shows off the store’s Butter Frenzy 2 arcade game, which allows players to try their best to take home a stick of warm butter from inside a claw machine.
It will probably be a while longer before it feels safe to venture inside the actual Omega Mart installation in Las Vegas, but for now we can at least enjoy getting a disconcertedly meaty taste of the project through its commercials—and never feeling totally right when shopping for groceries anytime soon.
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