Your local Denny’s, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, is no longer at war only with your digestive system, but the stars themselves. Adopting the runt of the new Star Wars film litter, Solo, as a marketing partner, the restaurant chain has hit a real Grand Slamwich with a new commercial that shows off both its tie-in collectible trading cards and a few greasy morsels of new information from the movie itself.
The spot pans around a fantasy cantina, bustling with wacky, newly revealed aliens presumably fortifying their inhuman bodies with Moons Over My Hammy sandwiches just off screen, before focusing in on a rousing game of Space Poker. We see not just fresh alien designs, like a scaly moleman in welding goggles and a throat-singing fish thing in a fur coat, but a recreation of Han and Lando’s bet for the Millennium Falcon, too.
Sure, the actors may be little baby versions of the characters and the hook for the commercial may be them trading promotional Denny’s cards in a real-life, fluorescent mega-diner, but, for the real Forceheads desperate for a glimpse of a quickly approaching movie that has mostly been shrouded in secrecy and rumor, it’s better than nothing.
If the ad itself isn’t enough, we’ve also been provided a few more informative drips from the partnership in the form of the trading cards themselves, which show off a few new characters. Look forward to future classics with the bizarre, otherworldly names you’ve come to expect from Stars Wars, like Moloch, Therm Scissorpunch ... and, uh, Val.
It’s impossible to say what playground trade value these cards will have, but it seems safe to bet that one picture of a crab in a spacesuit named “Therm Scissorpunch” will be worth at least 15 of a human woman wearing a bomber jacket called Val.
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