This crosses a line - even for Hormel

I don't know that anyone has ever sat down with a Hormel product and thought "Goddamn! That's some quality meat!". And yet ... whatever sorcery of meat processing Hormel possessed back in the day turned out the best-tasting horrible food one could hope to get their mouth on. Even - and this is important for later - Hormel Chili. Don't ask what's in that can; it just tastes "good" to people somehow.

So here we find a Hormel ad featuring a culinary invention they're calling "Frank 'N Stuff" - a hot dog stuffed, we clearly see on the label, with "cheese" and apparently it's perfect for that picnic you're planning. And that's all fine and good. Sickly pink little meat tubes sliced cold to show some manner of cheese goo pumped inside - yeah, throw those in the beans! I have no idea what that ends up being like once the tube slices get heated up, but ok. And grilled to a slightly-less-sickly-pink color with some mustard and fresh onions? Sure, why not.

But let's take a little closer look here. We notice five seconds in to the spot that two packs of Frank 'N Stuff came out of that picnic basket. We only see the front package's label, so surely everybody's just hungry and can't get enough cheese-goo-infused Frank 'N Stuffs. But then at seven seconds the camera pans across the grill and ... wait ... the second pack of Frank 'N Stuff is different somehow. There's no way it's a mistake that the lighting of this shot doesn't let us get a real clear shot of what this other Frank 'N Stuff product is.

And then, at 24 seconds, we get a full pan across a range of Hormel products. And there it is. The other Frank 'N Stuff is ... CHILI. Cursed Hormel Chili liberated from its can and somehow coaxed into the middle of Hormel hot dogs??? I'm not going to lie and say a can of Hormel Chili has never called my name in a dark hour, but this is just beyond a rational thing to have created. And I'm guessing the Hormel team realized this given the way they try to hide the fact of Frank 'N Stuff Chili's existence. Maybe some Hormel great-grand-nephew made this product his MBA project and nobody within the company not named Hormel was empowered to stop it from going into production.

Incidentally, guitarist Smokey Hormel (real name Greg - disappointing) is the great-grandson of Hormel founder George A Hormel and was a touring member of The Blasters in the late 1980s and played on some Johnny Cash American Recordings records, but there's no evidence that he had anything to do with Frank 'N Stuff Chili hot dogs.

Also of note, at the end of the commercial (27 seconds in) we get a glimpse of Hormel Wranglers, which were the most fantastic not-quite-hot-dog sausage product ever created.

Credit: Nostalgic X'er
Original Video: 1980s commercials volume 20