The last time we saw Lee Dungaree’s spokesdoll, Buddy Lee, he was riding the backs of wild animals and hobnobbing with celebrities. In the latest campaign out of Fallon, Minneapolis, for the denim retailer, the 12-inch man of action appears in a DJ contest and wins. Excellent!
The :30 "Super Greg"—named after Buddy Lee’s challenger—opens like the start of a video game. Buddy Lee and Super Greg are framed in electronic graphics with titling that reads, "The Buddy Lee Challenge." As the two face off, Super Greg bellows, "I’ll beat you, Buddy Lee!" and the games begin.
Cut to the interior of a dimly lit recreation center, where two tables are set up on either side of the room. A sign overhead reads "The DJ Battle," as four semi-disinterested youths stand between the facing tables waiting for Super Greg to start spinning. Super Greg, looking like a later-period Freddie Mercury sporting an old school tracksuit and a uni-brow, begins scratching a dismal-sounding tune on his turntable. Disillusioned by his own abilities, he tries (unsuccessfully) to rally the small crowd by shouting into his microphone, "See all my people dancing? Yeah!"
One skeptical teen puts a stop to Super Greg’s sad noisemaking and the group turns to see what Buddy Lee has to offer. Poised between a turntable, and a fish tank containing an electric eel, Buddy Lee proceeds to stick a fork into the tank, transmitting an electrical shock through his body and into his hand, allowing him to burst into a frenzy of scratching. The kids start to boogie, and Buddy Lee gets so charged up, he catapults through the air, lands in the middle of the floor, and busts into a break-dancing backspin. The crowd goes wild as a robotic-sounding voiceover states: "Buddy Lee wins. Excellent." The doll and Super Greg bow to each other like Sumo wrestlers as the voiceover invites the viewer to "Play the game at BuddyLee. com."
"Super Greg" was part of a three-spot campaign that also included "Curry" and "Roy." Each scenario presents Buddy Lee with a bizarre challenge, like go-carting and kung-fu. But the real challenge came when the agency creatives were faced with the task of reinventing the super doll they’d masterminded two years ago.
When Fallon resurrected the original Lee Dungarees icon from the 1920s, Buddy Lee’s image was that of an ultra-hip, cult hero. Celebrities like Liv Tyler and Samuel L. Jackson were seen wearing Buddy Lee T-shirts, Fallon plastered posters of the doll all over U.S. cities, and ads ran at three in the morning on Comedy Central. While accessible to mainstream audiences, Buddy Lee was presented like a subterranean figure, and to be in the know was to be cool.
This time around, the agency wanted to re-harness some of Buddy Lee’s original enigmatic status. "We thought it had gotten a little bit into the middle of the road and we thought it was time to put it back to the side of the road again," said Fallon creative director David Lubars.
Lubars enlisted "The Swedes," the Fallon creative team comprised of copywriter Linus Karlsson and art director Paul Malstrom, to give the spots the unique color the client was looking for. "Our market was officially 17- to 22-year-olds—the most cynical, ‘what’s-hip’ group there is. This really called for that ironic, goofy sort of thing that The Swedes do so well," explained Lubars.
Fallon subsequently launched a thoroughly integrated campaign, including print ads, posters, a Web site, and a series of email virals introducing the spots’ characters, once again making Buddy Lee something to talk about.
What this meant for director Fredrik Bond of London-based Harry Nash was that Buddy Lee’s challengers needed to be cast very early on. This would give the agency enough time to craft all its other promotional pieces around them.
"Before we did anything, we found the characters and then worked on developing them. In the case of Super Greg, we figured he’s this guy who’s wearing his older brother’s tracksuit because he’s trying to be cool, but he’s not," explained Bond. According to Bond, the man who played Super Greg was a very bad DJ in real life. In fact, Bond deliberately interviewed several substandard DJs for the part in order to capture the pathetic nature of their spinning abilities. "It was quite fun because we had all these fucked-up DJs exchanging experiences in the waiting room," Bond recalled.
While Buddy Lee fanfare boasts, "Can’t Bust ‘Em," the production wasn’t so sure. To be safe, about 12 Buddy Lee heads and six bodies were on hand for the shoot, in case of any "accidents." Helen Wise, a seamstress for the Royal Opera House in London, created minute clothes out of Lee fabric for the doll.
The one-day shoot took place in a recreation center in the London district of Notting Hill. Lubars explained that production designer Chris Oddy deliberately kept the set simple so that the production wouldn’t get in the way of the story. Buddy Lee’s movements were rendered very low-tech for the same reason. "The only time Buddy moves, we just pushed a stick in his back and had someone behind him shaking him," said Bond.
Buddy Lee’s flip through the air was simulated by putting him on one end of a seesaw-like rig and hammering the other end to send him flying. Once he landed, his backspin was made possible by drilling a rotating plate into his back and spinning him around.
In post, London-based The Mill was deployed to paint out all the people operating Buddy Lee, to manipulate the electric eel (which was fake), and to create the title treatments. "They had done a lot of low-fi things in camera, which meant we didn’t have to generate a lot of effects, but we did have to do an awful lot of rig removal [in Flame]," explained The Mill producer Austen Humpheries.
Perhaps the biggest winner in the campaign was not Buddy Lee, but the crew that shot the spot. According to Harry Nash executive producer Helen Williams, the client gave the crew 200 pairs of jeans to keep after the shoot. "In all my experience in advertising, no one has ever done that," said Williams.
