I just called one of the animal tech guys a burger queen. He said fuck you and walked away. Now I can’t stop laughing. I have the church giggles.
If I had my druthers, you’d only be able to buy the limited supply of Whoppers with Monopoly money, perhaps thereby slowing down the phasing out of both.
Michael Douglas shoulda totally shot up that BK…
(“I think we have a critic here! I don’t think she likes the special sauce, Rick”)
Oh, on the other tangent- the crazy nazi guy in that movie tells the gay guy in his shop, “Take a hike, Mary”…
I guess I’m in the vast minority apparently, because I got a kick out of these commercials. Hidden camera shtick has always amused me, regardless of its point; I don’t eat at BK because I’ve never found anything there I really like (if I’m going the fast-food route I prefer Popeye’s or McD’s, because I am mildly addicted to McD’s french fries) but I think these commercials are amusing and definitely eye-catching.
I’m sure there were plenty of customers who said, “Um…that really sucks…okay, I’ll have Menu Item X instead,” but what’s the point of showing the polite people? They wanted to show ordinary people freaking out because they’re addicted to the Whopper.
I dunno. I thought it was entertaining and I didn’t take it seriously at all. I don’t get all the vitriol displayed here.
I’m with you Audrey Levins. I thought it was a pretty funny and amusing advertisment. Any commercial where the sheeple get riled up a bit gets a check mark in my book.
Also, I can see where the people are coming from,although obviously some people, like the vaguely-threatening-man and the get-a-manager-now biyatch take it too far. Almost every day on my way to campus, I stop by a local sandwich store and order a roast beef sub. Sometimes they are out of roast beef, and that’s a bummer. Now, if the kind sandwich lady said that they were out of roast beef forever, while I wouldn’t go into a rage or make any threats, I would definitely register a sense of WTF and probably complain a little.
Other than that, I like BK burgers. Flame-broiled deliciousness!
This actually does happen…it’s not that they are out of roast beef, it’s that they didn’t thaw enough for demand, and you can’t slap one on the slicer until its internal temp reaches 140 or whatever it was. This happened once when I worked there eons ago during bar rush and prom night, and a 5 for 5 promo (the unholy trinity).
I handed out a lot of free curly fries that night to drunks of all ages, until we got some up to safe (and legal) temp by quartering the roasts before they went in the oven.
That was Alka-seltzer, from the 70s. I’m just sayin’…
I love me some Burger King, but cannot fathom getting upset if they discontinued a particular sandwich- as noted above, what’s the difference between a Whopper and any of their various other meat based sandwiches? It’s not like they switched to a vegan menu or anything- just order the double cheeseburger or whatever.
And I too thought the people on camera were actors- to think their reactions to a burger were legitimate is pretty sad.
It seems to me that the underlying message of these commercials is “The Whopper is the only thing on our menu worth ordering. The rest of our food sucks.”
That’s quality advertisement.
(And I just wasted my 1000th post on Burger King.)
That’s why I don’ t think the commercial was referring to Burger Queen, like that one hypothesis. I don’t think they were very wide-spread at all. So the referene would be lost if that’s what they wanted to do in a nationally broadcast commercial.
I don’t interpret the “burger queen” to be anti-gay though. It’s probably meant as a “no meat, no muscle, girly”. Kind of like: “He doesn’t have the stones.” “He has no bite.” Etc. But it suggests equally “no meat, no substance, girly, not worth it”. Eeesh, that’s not going to go over well.
No worries. I apparantly wasted my 900th on a post in which nobody bothered to get the point…
They’re long gone. Most of them became Dairy Queens in the late 80s. (Damn shame, too; their fish dinner rocked my preteen world.)
So get your massage while eating a Whopper. 
Don’t you mean “If I had my Burger Queens…”
Because when somebody is vocally offended by something so small that was probably misconstrued anyway, it demeans the whole issue. Think about it.
Let me tell you a story about Amelia Rideau. She was the black junior English Major at the University of Wisconsin who complained to the faculty board after her professor used the word “niggardly” when teaching Chaucer. She famously said, “It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid”. Kinda sounds like your point, doesn’t it? Her complaints had the opposite effect as she intended. Not only was the word not banned, It was embraced. The school scraped all proposed academic speech codes (including some prohibiting hate speech) in favor of academic freedom, a firestorm of sophomoric jokes took over the late night shows, and any national dialog about race relations was hopeless mired in this stupid, stupid controversy.
The more ridiculous the complaint, the farther the mainstream is going to walk away from the issue. I know there is discrimination against gays in this country, but when you complain about shit like “Burger Queen” being homophobic, people stop listening to you. You become your cause’s equivalent to PETA, who make this animal lover want to throw on a fur coat and napalm the rain forest.
It’s important to us, because we don’t like seeing anybody endanger a worthy cause by crying wolf, and you remember how that story turned out.
Man, I am cool with what any persons sexuality is or isn’t. I’m down with gay rights.
However, the minute you begin to start complaining about “micro-aggressions”, imho, means you don’t have anything left to fuss about. My support would drop to zero, and I suspect that a great majority of folks would as well.
The joke was a low-brow that shouldn’t have been made in mixed company, and I think it quite stupid of BK to use it.
This wins the thread in my book.
There were others in this thread who agreed with Otto (that at the least, it sounded sexist/misogynistic, if not the homophobic aspect). The first thing that I thought when I heard “Burger Queen” was that it was homophobic, as well. I’m a straight chick and I thought homophobic before misogynistic, but I thought either one was pretty obvious.
“Queen” is well enough known as being a disparaging term for homosexuals that it’s listed as one of the dictionary references. It’s not like it’s an obscure slang term only a few would get or something really buried and long ago that people aren’t going to understand. I thought it was lame and showed the speaker as an idiot, but it certainly works as insulting in both of the way mentioned in the OP and would be understood by many to be so.
I don’t really think your example works as a proper analogy, since it’s about one idiot misunderstanding the meaning of a word. “Queen” actually is a well-known insulting term.
That’s a very interesting theory, DF, but it’s really just your uneducated opinion. The fact is, no one really knows how advertising works, and there are plenty of examples of “negative” publicity leading to positive sales. So while advertising is not enough of a science for you to be equivocally wrong, you’re actually, in practice, more wrong than right.
You’re not really helping your case with that example. JitB suffered a huge drop in sales because a few stories that “got people talking”. Recovering from that drop took a huge effort and expenditure, plus an extensive ad campaign focusing exclusively on how good the quality of their food was.
I seem to recall that ad is for either CJ’s or Wendy’s. I agree with you about how annoying it is. That is one disgusting advertisement.