Budweiser Frogs

The Budweiser Frogs debuted during Super Bowl XXIX in January 1995: a moonlit swamp, a neon Budweiser sign glowing across the water, and three photorealistic frogs — named Bud, Weis, and Er — croaking their syllables until they synced into the brand name. The spot came from the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles agency in St. Louis, and its director was a then-unknown named Gore Verbinski, who would go on to make The Ring and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The frogs themselves weren't CGI — they were silicone-skinned animatronic puppets from The Character Shop that could breathe, blink, and bloat their throats on radio control, which is exactly why they looked eerily real on a 1995 television.

The campaign became one of the most quoted, parodied, and beloved pieces of 90s advertising — Adweek would later call it one of the most iconic alcohol campaigns in history. Sequels expanded the swamp into a soap opera: starting at Super Bowl XXXII in 1998, the Goodby, Silverstein & Partners agency introduced Louie and Frankie, a pair of scheming chameleons (Louie, with his Brooklyn accent, was consumed with jealousy of the frogs' fame), and by 2000 the lizards had largely taken over before Budweiser moved on to "Whassup?" — the next catchphrase America couldn't stop doing.

The frogs' cultural reach was also their indictment. A 1996 study found that more children recognized the Budweiser frogs — and correctly matched them to beer — than recognized Ronald McDonald or Smokey Bear; among characters tested, only Bugs Bunny ranked higher. For a beer ad, that was a devastating kind of success, fueling criticism that the campaign worked like a kids' cartoon, and Budweiser eventually scaled it back. Which is, of course, the whole strange truth of this entry: an enormous share of the people who remember the frogs word-for-word were grade-schoolers doing the croak on the playground Monday morning.