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Friday, January 9th, 2004
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| One Liner: | The foundation on which my life is built is eroding piece by piece |
| Time of Death: | 4:41 am. |
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 Today I saw a commercial for the new and improved Brawny papertowels. The confident marketing claims that anyone who gets their hands on a sheet of their revolutionized paper product will be instantly impressed. The commercial ends as most Brawny commercials have in the past, with a closeup look at the man behind the mustache, the Brawny Man of the Brawny Logo...but whats this? A new look? The Brawny Man is now clean shaven!
This is a travesty of epic proportions. The Brawny man has been a solid pillar on which to rely for support. The design has gone through minor but well documented changes since 1974, but one thing stayed constant, and that was the man himself in all his mustached glory. He's gotten new shirts and walked through different forests, even donning a santa cap for the holiday season, but its always the same eerily handsome man with the stache looking back at you from the supermarket shelves.
Now that this has changed, I'm really not sure what I can rely on.. I mean its not even the same guy anymore, even cartoon lumberjacks are replaceable. What exactly went wrong? I understand that the folks at Brawny want the best possible face to market to bring in the customers, in order to keep up with some of the advertising geniuses at Bounty. And it is safe to say that middle aged men with mustaches are not nearly the rage that they once were, and trust me they were huge in their heyday.
But when your whole image, your company name, is hanging on one face, you want it to be one that the public can trust, and I think that the original Brawny man brought that to the table. It can't be a problem of aging, because that dude had been 35 for 30 years. He hadn't aged a bit, and you can contribute that to his all herbal, all natural strict dietary regiment, but I think it has to do with the fact that he's a cartoon.
 Now I wasn't resting easy with the thoughts of Mr. Brawn-Brawn as I liked to call him, coming to work one day to find that while he was taking a nice well-deserved, company paid, vacation in Tahiti, that he had been replaced by some young upstart pretty boy who slept his way to the top, without so much as a toilet paper ad in his resume. And god-forbid that the real Brawny Man was locked in a closet somewhere, and this new impostor had told the suits that he was the same Mr. Brawn Brawn and he had gotten a shave and a haircut, and maybe used a facial scrub or something to look youthful. So I looked into it.
I made a few calls, and I when I was done, I think I would have been happier if I had just let it be, Brawn Brawn's legacy intact. It turns out that The original Mr. Brawn Brawn had an abusive temper, and was a bit of a coke fiend. Yes, I was shocked and saddened as well. However, his paper towel producing bosses couldn't fire him because he was under an iron clad contract until the end of 2003. When the contract was first drafted, it was October 1974, and ownership and most of the lawyers were high on something or another. Not ever concieving the mustached lumberjack would go out of style, they arbitrarily chose 2004, 30 years later as the time to renegotiate the contract. They thought they were gettting one hell of a deal, signing a young lumberjack type for 30 years for a static 1974's salary.
Well, when the 70's ended, Mr. Brawn Brawn was not allowed to change under contract. This and the fact that he was being greatly underpaid, as inflation set in, to be the national spokeman for a popular paper product, drove him to fits of rage and several overdoses that were kept very secret until now. The people at Brawny had covered up several major incidents in order to keep their image clean, including a felony manslaughter charge during a drug frenzied 1987 couple swapping party. Their was also several DUI's and an aggravated assault on a cocktail waitress that never made the papers, due to some clever cover-ups.
When the end of 2003 was approaching, the company sent Mr. Brawn Brawn to Tahiti while they prepared the new face of Brawny, a lumberjack from Manitoba, named Paul, which pending a blood test, is said to be an illegitimate child of the original Mr. Brawn Brawn. So in a way, the legacy of Brawny will live on, through Paul Flinger-Brawn Brawn, which is something positive to be said from this whole ordeal.
Abusive addict or not, I'd still rather feel save snuggling up at night with a soft roll of Brawny that sports the original logo, in the comforting embrace of a bona-fide lumberjack saving me from a forest fire, Instead of this new logo that makes me feel quite like I'm in a gay themed bar, nuzzling my cheek against the chizzled chest of a sweaty model that poses as a lumberjack.
"This lumberjack may have looked like he was carrying an ax in the 1970s but, in fact, he carried a peavey, a wooden lever used by lumbermen to handle logs" (X).
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