The year was 2004. The iPhone was still 3 years away, and YouTube hadn't been invented. Yes, it was practically the Stone Age. But there was this webcam website called subservientchicken.com where you could type commands and get a man in a chicken suit to dance “The Robot” and perform other puerile tasks. The site (and the chicken) became one of most successful viral marketing campaigns of all time, promoting Burger King's TenderCrisp Chicken sandwich.
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Now Burger King is resurrecting the site and the character to promote its new Chicken Big King sandwich. Though the site is absent of the chicken for now (with just an old Windows error box saying “Help. There's a chicken on the loose and we are desperately trying to find him”), Burger King has taken out ads in the major newspapers hinting of its return and will post a 10-minute video on Wednesday showing what the chicken has been up to for the last decade.
While I still love the idea of the Subservient Chicken, let's hope they keep that creepy, mute King mascot retired.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.