I’m Really Sorry, but Let’s Talk About That Chicken Movie

Late last month, the crew of a helicopter surveying a desolate stretch of the Utah desert came across an unexpected finding: a metal structure, tall and thin, gleaming among the matte-red rocks. Soon after, the object vanished. But people began finding similar ones, in California and Romania and the Netherlands—elongated prisms studding the earth, their provenance, for the most part, unknown. The public reaction to all the mystery has been, primarily, not wonder so much as weariness: Please, please, let it be aliens and not a publicity stunt.

I mention this because last week, Kentucky Fried Chicken the latest in its own long-running : a 15-minute-long “mini movie” starring Mario . The trailer for the ad (yep, this ad has a trailer) promised a “steamy holiday love affair” and offered up a version of Sanders—a figure most familiar as white-haired and spectacled—retrofitted with the iconography of romance: shirt tight, sleeves short, the traditional bowtie replaced by a louchely knotted neckerchief. The Harland-meets-