Too Many Cooks and other brilliant viral fake adverts

5 Oct 2015

One of the strangest viral video campaigns of recent years saw the TV channel Adult Swim air bizarre fake adverts without warning, most notably Too Many Cooks, but also some other downright weird examples.

The concept for these confounding videos came from Adult Swim producer Casper Kelly, who suggested the idea for sketches that were off-the-wall bizarre imitations of TV adverts.

The first they filmed was Too Many Cooks, which initially looked liked many of the typical 1980s American sitcom and drama opening numbers, but then descends into madness.

Filmed over the space of a year, Kelly recruited a whole range of extras in the area to add to the huge cast seen on screen.

In true viral glory, Adult Swim decided to air the 11-minute short at 4am on Halloween 2014 and, using the power of social media, ratcheted up over 300,000 views in one day.

They didn’t stop there, however, as Too Many Cooks was followed by Unedited Footage of a Bear, which starts as the title suggests, but becomes a warped look at the alleged over-prescription of medicine in the US.

Have a gander at some more of Adult Swim’s ‘infomercials’, which really take things to strange places.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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