That’s What’s Going Down.

Things are not looking good.

Director Charles Stone III’s original 2000 “Wassup!” commercial for Anheuser-Busch may be one of the best-known TV ads ever made. It’s easily the most parodied. Not only did it inspire take-offs, and some of the internet’s first viral videos, twisting the bit’s tagline around everything from Transformers to a Jewish brit milah, but Anheuser-Busch even followed up with their own riffs, like this yuppie-themed one.

That was right before Bush trashed America, though, and in “Wassup 2008,” above, Stone and his boys, having suffered the last eight years’ untrammeled evil, return jobless, absent health insurance, mired in Iraq, grasping at vanishing 401Ks, and helplessly battling what looks like Hurricane Katrina’s big sister—until, at the piece’s end, they get a glimpse of the dawning Obama Age.

It’s probably the best satire of the original ad yet. I don’t know what’s cooler: The way Stone densely packs each escalating moment of the new work with biting commentary, or that, effectively, he’s doing this on Budweiser heiress Cindy McCain’s dime.

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1 comment so far ↓

#1 hottnikz on 10.28.08 at 7:35 pm

I assumed he funded the video, since the video had a disclaimer that it didn’t express the views of Budweiser.

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