The Snickers CHEFS Commercial – Does This Remake Hit the Mark?

In a world where people get sick of remakes pretty quickly, Snickers is trying to break the mold. Sure, it’s TV and film that mostly get a bad wrap when shows and movies are repackaged as something new when the originals were just fine. But can that be said for commercials, too? Before the 2023 reboot, here’s the original Snickers CHEFS commercial from 1996.

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SO Nice They’re Doing It Twice. A critical mistake, a funny catchphrase, and a grumpy old man add up to a great commercial. Now, decades later, Snickers gave the commercial a makeover. Check it out…

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There’s No I In Team. But there’s definitely an ‘I’ in CHIEFS. It’s a great premise for a commercial, especially when ‘i before e, except after c’ is a rule of thumb people always get wrong. Just ask me to spell the word wierd and I’ll get it wrong 50% of the time. Somehow though, the creators of this ad managed to take something that was funny and make it… less funny. Weird.

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Choo Choo All Aboard. Everyone’s riding the Kansas City Chiefs money train (especially since Taylor Swift single-handedly put Travis Kelce on the map!) so it makes sense Snickers would hop aboard, too. But what they’ve done is the equivalent to movie studios taking an animated classic and turning it into a live-action remake. “But why?” is a question you’ll hear a lot. The new Snickers commercial basically copied the original almost shot for shot but they forgot one thing, the humor. The sound design is poor, as well. Background audio is too low, which adds to the disjointedness of the conversation and the voiceover. The original commercial shines with great comedic timing and seamless flow, things the follow-up lacks entirely.

In fact, the only funny part in this failed attempt at a remake is the CHIEFS misspelling. None of the other jokes hit. The grumpy old man in the original is so frustrated when he says “great googly moogly” and then the player doubles down by mentioning the spelling AGAIN, just hilarious. The young man in the new ad says “great googly moogly” with no emotion at all. Not even dry humor, if that’s what the attempt was.

Snickers, you’re not yourself when you try remaking a classic.

-Out of the Wilderness