Super Bowl 2020: Mr. Peanut's Death Riles up Social Media
In one of the strangest marketing stunts of the year, Planters Peanuts announced on Monday that [...]
Bad Year
Imagine being the people who looked at 2020 and went, "This year isn't shitty enough. Let's kill Mr. Peanut."#ripmrpeanut
— thebarbercangiveyouahaircut (@badbangsclub) January 22, 2020
Celebrity deaths are often tied to the year they occurred, helping to characterize that year as bad overall. Some users tried to apply that method of scrutiny to 2020 early on through the death of Mr. Peanut, though others looked at it from a more detached perspective, wondering if the marketing team at Planters had foreseen it.
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So when they cremate Mr. Peanut, do they honey roast him or
— Carly (@nuclearcarly) January 22, 2020
Naturally there were plenty of jokes about Mr. Peanut floating around on Wednesday, particularly from salty snack lovers. Many users wondered what would happen to Mr. Peanut's body, and whether it would become more delicious.
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We are so far into the concept of brands establishing a social prescence online as if they were a real person that we are literally killing a completely fictional cartoon peanut and holding an actual memorial service for him pic.twitter.com/ZKS3GKTjU1
— Byleth hate blog (@WendySnowRadish) January 22, 2020
Some users were more alarmed than amused by this trending topic, seeing it as a ghoulish escalation of growing trend. There are plenty of Twitter users who resent the way brands present themselves as relatable on social media, and they were not into the idea that they could die now as well.
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Convenient. Right as the allegations surfaced. https://t.co/DgwDCnRCks
— Jim Tews (@jimtews) January 22, 2020
I shall not mourn the death of Mr. Peanut. A capitalist who feeds his own kind to the machine in order to increase profits is exactly the kind of person who should be yeeted into an explosion #RIPMrPeanut
— نورجہاں پلّا (Pup Noor Jahan) (@PupNoorJahan) January 22, 2020
Planters probably hoped that people would get in on the joke and play along, but they may not have liked where some folks took it. The expanding, memetic fiction of Mr. Planters' life and the world he lived in got dark incredibly fast, with many people asserting problematic stories about him as if they were truth. With no central authorial source to rely on, these could all be taken as canon.
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BREAKING!
— Polite DesertPogona (@DesertPogona) January 22, 2020
Mr. Peanut Might Not Be Dead After All. Drone Footage Of Remote Island Shows Mysterious Peanut-Like Man. pic.twitter.com/BAZkU82oNB
Presuming that Mr. Peanut would be revived somehow in Planters' Super Bowl ad, many people got to work theorizing, either about how the mascot was still alive or would be brought back from the dead. Some even drew grisly associations between this and other popular conspiracy theory cases, such as that of Jeffrey Epstein.
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do u think in high peanut society there is a meghan mccain peanut who constantly reminds other peanuts that mr. peanut was her father?
just some thoughts.
— Angelina Christina 🤭 (@whyangelinawhy) January 22, 2020
Given the slight provocation, many people began spinning out yarns of fiction about the peanut society Mr. Peanut comes from. Assuming he is not the only one of his kind, users speculated about what kind of role he might occupy in his world, and who he might be compared to.
prevnextReal News
The president of the United States is going on trial for high crimes and misdemeanors and the cool thing to do is completely ignore it and tweet about a dead peanut
— Abraham Riesman אברהם ריסמן (@abrahamjoseph) January 22, 2020
Finally, there were plenty of people who were disgusted to see Mr. Peanut trending on Wednesday with everything else going on in the world. The impeachment hearings for President Donald Trump officially got underway that morning, and some resented Planters for trying to overshadow that news. They resented Twitter at large for indulging them, too.
Super Bowl LIV airs live on Sunday, Feb. 2 on Fox.
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