Okay, okay. Dumb question, but it’s been bugging me.
There’s some commercial for Scott[sup]TM[/sup] paper towels featuring a bunch of rogue chefs running around the country picking up spills. At one point they show a chef on a boat trying to coax a lobster to go back into the sea. The lobster just sits there, wiggling it’s gills.
The problem: The lobster is red.
Doesn’t the fact that the lobster is red mean that the lobster has been cooked? If so, why would they go to the trouble to animate a little twittering gill?
Because everybody “knows” that lobsters are red. If you put a blue-green lobster on screen, everybody’s going to be wondering “why the hell isn’t that lobster red,” rather than on the message of the commmercial, which is “use paper towels.”
Ever seen that Simpsons where Homer buys the smallest lobster he can find and mothers it? He takes it for walks on the beach and such… I think his name was Pinchy. It got up to something like 50lbs or some damn thing. All was fine until he gave him too hot of a bath.
All things in life worth doing have been done on the Simpsons…
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Generally, you are correct and the ad-team probably made the lobster red based on “most people believe lobsters are red.” That said, there are some species of lobster which have been found to already be partly or completely red/orange (or other colors) versus the brown American Lobster species served in U.S. restaurants.
In related news, just thought you’d find this tangent interesting: Size matters to a lobster; since lobsters continue to grow as they age, this is probably a pretty old lobster…
