Warning: This is going to be long.
Video Links: Part 1 and Part 2.
The video starts with Wendy's founder Dave Thomas standing in a freezer. If all you know about Dave comes from 90's era Wendy's commercials then brace yourself. Because even though this was filmed 13 years before he died they still managed to film it entirely with his reanimated corpse. He seems to be somewhere between bored as hell and suicidal for the entire video.
It's not polite to mock the dead so I won't go too much into his speech impediment here. Suffice to say that after two minutes of telling us how he has the fray-shest burgers in the bid-ness, he leaves us alone so he can have an old fay-shioned hamburger with mustard, pickle and onions.
We cut to a static shot of a keyhole accompanied by random bird sounds. This scene drags out almost long enough to make you reach for a razor before we finally meet employee Bill. Bill is an idiot.
Anyway, Bill is told to go speak to the manager, Mary, who wants him to learn how to work the grill. Before sitting him down with a training video (yes, the character watches a training video in this training video) she takes the time to remind him that Wendy's only uses 100% pure ground beef, because apparently no one ever explained to the actress that this was a training video and not a commercial.
Anyway, Bill puts the video into the television and this is where everything goes to Hell. The television promptly explodes in a cloud of smoke, which forms into a disembodied spectral head. Because we've already established that Wendy's training videos are made by necromancers this surprises nobody but Bill, not that you'd know he was surprised from the actor's performance. The head introduces itself as the Duke of the Grill (vassal of the Burger King, I'm sure) and drags Bill into the TV and no, I am not making any of this up. It really happens.
Bill finds himself in the home dimension of the Duke of the Grill, who happens to be a dorky black guy in gold-rimmed sunglasses. Sadly for the Duke, his world is nothing but a tiny cage floating in a black void filled with laser lights, his only furniture a single Wendy's grill, and his only food an endless supply of cheese, buns, and talking meat patties.
What happens next is one of the most painful moments ever recorded to video: a two minute rap about hamburgers. To be fair, the Duke isn't the worst rapper I've ever heard, though that's mostly because Bill tries to rap too. To be unfair, it doesn't matter how good he is, because either way he's still rapping about Wendy's hamburger patties. Snoop Dogg may have been able to name himself after a cartoon character without losing street cred, but even he would look like a jackass doing this rap.
Over the course of the longest two minutes of your life, the Duke explains the proper way to cook a Wendy's burger. The first thing you may notice is he's not wearing any sort of gloves. This is not a mistake. The grill worker doesn't wear gloves for safety reasons. If you accidentally touch the grill or get a grease splatter on your hands then latex gloves will melt and stick to you, turning what would be a mild first-degree burn into a hospital stay. As for cleanliness, well, they're supposed to wash their hands. Personally I always washed my hands before work, but to be totally honest I think I was the only one.
Anyway, on to the actual preparation First you lay it on the grill with the help of an arrow on a piece of paper, because meat has grain (just like wood) and if you lay it down improperly it will turn into deadly poison and murder your dog while it sleeps. Anyway, he then explains about the four corner press. This is where you crush the meat into the grill to spread it out and make it cook faster. As the name implies, you press the meat four times, and you do this twice for a grand total of eight smashes. Usually pressing meat out on a grill like that dries it out, but Wendy's burgers have so much fat in them that even after being smashed out eight times you still have to drain it off, as shown.
Finally the Duke finishes up his rap. Unfortunately, Bill then does the exact same rap again, only with infinity times less enthusiasm. After a gloriously failed attempt at a fist bump, the Duke goes into *shudder* a second verse, this time about how to add cheese to a burger. Defying all logic, this process somehow manages to be longer than one step.
He also mentions that you must never serve burnt, dry, broken, or incomplete patties because "quality is our recipe." But because they use a different recipe for chili, they are allowed to put the burnt, crappy meat into that. That may not sound very appetizing, but to be fair they do shove said meat into a drawer over the grill for several hours before someone finally comes to get it and stick it in the chili pot. Eat up, chili fans!
Finally we cut back to the real world, where Mary snaps Bill out of his smoke-inhalation-induced hallucination by screaming in his ear. As they leave, the camera hangs on the TV way too long in a segment that makes me think the thing is about to transform and eat everyone. Sadly, it doesn't.
Instead we get a montage of Mary teaching Bill the same thing he just learned on the video, then spending the rest of the day watching over his shoulder like a crazy person while taking notes. Clearly after watching the kid stare slack-jawed at a malfunctioning TV for what must have been hours she realized he couldn't be trusted to operate a spatula without close supervision.
Finally, we're back to Dave, who has just received his old fay-shioned hamburger from a girl wearing gigantic nerd glasses. Dave almost bites into his skimpy little burger before realizing what an awful idea that is and putting the horrible greaseball down. He then rephrases the opening speech, this time making sure to assure us that cooking a burger is a very difficult and extraordinary talent that takes lots of practice. You keep telling yourself that, Dave.
We end on a two-minute music video for an awful song called Grill Skill, over which we see clips of hideous people cooking hideous burgers while simultaneously flexing their scrawny muscles, lip synching badly, and playing air guitar with their spatulas.
I actually feel a little bad about making fun of this video, because it's obvious that some poor, misguided person really tried his best on it. That person was the geek who played the Duke of the Grill. As for the other "actors," Bill and Mary's performances are almost good enough to be called phoned in, but the real shining star of half-assedness is Dave Thomas himself whose performance is somewhere between "smoke-signaled" and "100-character tweet without bothering to capitalize the 'I's."
As for the special effects editor (and never before or since has the word "special" been more appropriate), he seems to have tried his best given that a head of cabbage has more brain matter in it than his head.
That's really all there is to say about this video, but there is one last thing I want to leave you with...always remember: Wendy's 100% real ground beef is pattied into squares so the meat hangs off the edge of the bun.
1 comment:
You are over the top brilliant. Funniest thing I've read in a lonnnng time@!!
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