Hamsters!

Okay, so I never get to write about anything other than 1) weight stuff 2) poverty and 3) local Toledo stuff for the local Toledo weekly that I slum it up with sometimes.

Here's something I wrote that's not going anywhere else. I think hamsters are damned important. Also, er, "urban".

“What’s the difference between a hamster and gerbil?” my boyfriend asked as I changed lanes doing about 80 miles an hour. We’d been talking about my latest obsession, the Kia Soul commercial where “urban” hamsters head-bob in unison to The Choice is Yours by the Black Sheep.

“Gerbils have a longer tail,” I said. “Also, they’d probably buy American.”

Ironically, this conversation about a Korean automaker and its spokesrodents happened on the Southfield Freeway near Detroit. As I zoomed by Ford’s world headquarters, a shiny glass building that dominates the highway, I pondered urban hamsters in baggy pants and hoodies. Hamsters who live on Hamsterdam Avenue and drive shiny new Kia Souls while their (strangely nude) non-Kia cohorts drive things like washing machines and cardboard boxes.

These anthropomorphic rapping rodents have a seriously macho quality. The female hamsters in the ad wear old-school cheerleader skirts. They have no tops to speak of. The urban paradise of the Kia hamster features everything a dude could possibly want: woman-free time with the boyz in the Kia, the all-male barbershop for relaxation, and topless cheerleaders at the roadside, waiting in lush anticipation for the first hoodied-ham-stud in a Kia Soul to pull over and open the shiny green passenger side door. As a feminist, I should find all of this kind of insulting. Instead, I envision my own suburban Kia fantasy.

The man and woman hamster ride silently. No music – sadly, not a bit of Black Sheep to lighten the mood in their pristine silver Soul. The Hamstress (despite having no facial expression of any kind) seems distressed. She fishes around in the I-used-to-be-a-plastic-bag recycled tote and seems relieved to discover that she has indeed remembered the Hamayonaise.

I can’t stop talking about this Kia commercial. I’ve also watched it online at least ten times. I find myself finishing thoughts with “Do, da, dippity,” imitating the cadence and accent of the Black Sheep frontman, despite the fact that I am the whitest woman on earth; I carried a Bermuda bag to school every single day for at least six months in the fifth grade.

Why are these hamsters so fascinating? Part of it is the animation and the catchy song. Created by David & Goliath, the Los Angeles ad agency also responsible for the Bacardi & Cola campaign, the ad is an intricately detailed mini masterpiece of cutting-edge computer animation and smart ideas. According to D&G’s chairman, David Angelo, the hamsters represent sameness, going around in circles, and only the Kia Soul can save us from the sad ubiquity of workaday middle class existence. The shiny green hamster car would deliver Emma Bovary to a young lover (exactly five minutes after she drops the kids at soccer practice, one presumes).

Not only have the ads tapped some sort of angsty, bourgeois zeitgeist, they’ve sold a lot of cars. According to a Kia dealer quoted in Fortune, “"Demand has definitely exceeded expectations. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time we've sold out.” Fortune also found that 80% of Kia dealers nationwide had sold out on the Soul.

As successful as this ad is and as much as I personally enjoy it, I wonder about the urbanness of those dancing hamsters. They live near Hamsterdam Avenue. They frequent a barbershop, where the neighborhood’s elderstatesrodents gather to gossip and soak up the culture. In their baggy pants and hoodies, these cunning urban rodents are clearly stand-ins for African Americans.

Are African Americans cool enough to sell Kias, but still somehow too threatening for ads? I wonder, though I like to think – because I pretty much watch this commercial on a loop and have talked it up to everyone who’ll listen to me for more than 30 seconds – that the hamsters are just cuter and cleverer than any human beings (regardless of race) could ever hope to be. Also, African Americans couldn’t drive a toaster or washing machine, and these bad “choices” kind of make the ad.

I will not apologize for loving the Kia hamsters. I will not buy a Soul, either; I’m driving my six-year-old (mostly) paid-for Saturn Ion til it explodes in a shower of bolts at the side of the road, just like Elwood’s police car in the Blues Brothers. I’m not in the market for a car, but I think the hamsters could sell me almost anything else. Like, for example, a Black Sheep song from 1991.