Hasta La Creative!

If you thought there was no way to top a Paris Hilton-Hannah Ferguson slow-motion car-washing, sex-eating burger-palooza, you’d be wrong, Carl’s Jr. want to tell bros.

Supermodels and celebutantes don’t have the market cornered, after all, on using their scantily clad bums, stripper moves and garden hoses to hawk fast food. Along comes Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s Carl Brutananadilewski, a husky, hirsute late-night star, to show everybody how it’s done.

Just don’t eat that burger before you see the new commercial, airing online and during Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, where Aqua Teen Hunger Force anchors the block and Carl regularly heckles his neighbors Meatwad, Master Shake and Frylock.

Though lacking in the bronzed beauty and sex appeal of the burger joint’s former brand ambassadors—Padma Lakshmi, Heidi Klum and Kate Upton among them—Carl “brings a certain willingness to the role and a unique interpretation of fresh baked buns,” said Steve Lemley, svp of field marketing and media at Carl’s Jr. and sister chain Hardee’s.

The animated character is willing to wear a physique-inappropriate banana hammock, in other words, and writhe around on a Dodge Spyder while chomping a burger and slapping his ass.

The spot, written and produced by Aqua Teen Hunger Force creators with assists from 72andSunny and Initiative, promotes the chain’s bread, baked fresh in stores, which makes its buns “denser and a little sweeter” than competitors’ products, according to the press release.

Make that connection between the food and Carl’s lumpy posterior at your own risk.

Hungry yet?

Yes, you read that correctly: Adult Swim is making the rounds with a gigantic black-and-pink blow-up castle filled with (sponsored) attractions like a KFC-branded rotating mirror-tunnel, an Ice Breakers cage in which participants are required to sing for their freedom and sundry other extremely weird attractions.

We saw this nonsense last summer at San Diego Comic Con, and it's a good time. I don't remember the Tippy Tunnel, but then again, I don't remember much about the experience generally, and have only a T-shirt to prove I was there. Yes, the T-shirts will be a feature of the revitalized Fun House, too.

From February to May, the castle will tour colleges around the U.S., notably U.C. Riverside, Texas A&M, Auburn and some others—10 schools over 12 weeks, in all.

It's an unorthodox ad buy, to put it mildly, but KFC and Hershey's (which makes Ice Breakers) are getting spots on the network as part of their sponsorship of the various dizzy-making attractions. Those spots will also promote awareness of the Fun House on air, beginning Feb. 24 on Adult Swim.

2013 was a great year for the network—it came in second among 18-34-year-old viewers in prime time (to sister net TBS), despite not actually airing between 8 and 9 p.m. That's set to change in March, and with new airtime coming up, it's important to make sure Adult Swim's core audience is aware of the new time schedule.

Not that they have to take advice from me, but they're going to want to get something really big to promote that. Something that catches the eye.

If you were wandering aimlessly around Manhattan last week, you probably saw lampposts with a flier showing a cheap, grainy-looking photo of a spaceship and "take one" pull tabs at the bottom telling you to go to 23rd Street and Broadway to buy a slightly used spaceship.

When you got there, the perceptive among you may have noticed the spaceship, which appeared to have crashed into the ground next to the Flatiron Building, with cartoon characters Rick and Morty from the new Adult Swim show (titled, cleverly, Rick and Morty) hanging around. (Well, actually, they were statues. Morty was still inside, and Rick was on a bench taking a slug from a bottle of XXX.) The installation is pretty impressive—they even mangled some chairs that look like the furniture that sits in the public area around the building and arranged foam bricks that look exactly like chunks of the tan pavement.

The network's campaign for the show has been an elaborate one—there's an ad on Craigslist for the spaceship, too, as well as normal(ish) posters around town. The network also posted the first 22-minute episode of the show, which premieres Monday at 10:30 p.m., on YouTube. You can check it out below, along with the net's time-lapse video of its spaceship assemblage.

And we've got an interview with co-creator Dan Harmon here.

Here's a snippet we had to cut to make the interview fit in the magazine, but is still pretty cool: "It's very much like Doctor Who and Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker's Guide, and Willy Wonka," Harmon said when asked why he liked crazy, antisocial characters like Rick. "They just don't have time to interface with the people around them in a way that makes anybody comfortable. I think the answer over time is that you'll come to believe that he's a real person. I think even by the end of these first 10 episodes, we've figured out that the more hours you log with this guy, he never really jumps the shark in terms of revealing that he loves all the people around him, or crying and saying, 'Oh, it's so hard to be this big a prick,' but you get it, or you get that you don't get it. It made me so excited that this character could possibly live for a long time."

Check out the clip below to see how insane Rick is, or stop by the Flatiron to say hi until the end of today.

Just like your childhood heroes.

Advertising School: UFSC, Florianópolis, Brazil
Art Director / Copywriter: Angelo Maia