Taco Bell is shooting for some buzz about its new “biscuit taco” breakfast sandwich with a new YouTube video that portrays McDonald’s as an evil authoritarian empire with no tolerance for variety in what its dispirited citizens can eat for their morning meal.
The spot, entitled Routine Republic, depicts a regime not unlike the one seen in “The Hunger Games” movie series, but policed by uniformed thugs wearing a clown face. The populace lines up for a breakfast that could easily be mistaken for an Egg McMuffin. Two young people decide they’ve had enough, bolt from the line and head for a secret passage to a wonderful empire with other choices.
The video is larded with sly references to McDonald’s. For instance, one of the features that keeps citizens from leaving the land without choices is a moat made of the same balls used in a McDonald’s Playground ball crawl. The clown-faced policemen leave their headquarters via a slide similar to the one in a Playground. At one point an authoritarian guide fondles what looks like a burger-like character from one of McDonald’s commercials.
Never mentioned are McDonald’s, Taco Bell or even the new biscuit taco. The closes reference to Taco Bell is the repeated showings of a symbol that looks like its Crunchwrap product.
The spot had garnered almost 200,000 viewings in its first days on YouTube.
Taco Bell is rolling out its biscuit taco, in essence a taco whose shell has the consistency and taste of a biscuit, to replace the Waffle Taco. The biscuit shell is filled with a piece of fried chicken.
A chicken biscuit—a filet of chicken sandwiched inside a biscuit—is a signature of Chick-fil-A.
The rollout of the biscuit taco began this week.
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