Remembering how Dunkin Donuts hyped Halloween in the ’90s
Sorry, but whether one’s palate can tame Dunkin’s all-the-rage Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut or not, the temptation and anticipation are not the same without the late, great Michael Vale promoting the latest Halloween ploy as Fred the Baker.
In true 21st-century fashion, this year’s new limited-time product — whose spice, incidentally, is not even pumpkin — is subsisting mainly on crowd promotion by customers and commentators. Its introduction last week from Dunkin itself, as seen in the pinned tweet on the establishment’s Twitter profile, is more bland than grand. The 15-second clip contains no characters and no voices beyond a brief haunted-house chuckle.
No need to harp on it too much, though. Provided it never outright supplants Spooky Sprinkles and the like, Spicy Ghost will not be a problem.
That said, little or none of what we have seen or heard of it since its unveiling even whimpers Halloween. It is not unwelcome, but it need not aspire to the ceiling its still-running and sometimes evolving peers reached in stores and on the tube late in the last century.
Fortunately, the legacy of those products and how they started screaming their associated holiday lives. None other than a YouTube user by the domain name 90s Nostalgia leads that charge with a four-minute ad reel.
The first commercial touts the (then) new Dunkin Minis, ostensibly produced through electricity-induced shrinkage. In a predictably yet indispensably all-in Frankenstein parody, Fred and his lab assistant scramble to satisfy an oncoming horde of zombie customers ahead of their midnight arrival.
In 2020, the voltage metaphor would doubtlessly befit the appeal (if that’s what you call it) of the Spicy Ghost. If Vale and his donut-artist alter-ego were around today, it would also be tempting to call upon Casper to transfer his endorsement energy from Geico. Or, better yet, create a more original and menacing spirit to “inject” into the new pastry.
But speaking of donut art, the compilation’s second spot reminds us of when Fred and friends stuck the mugs of movie monsters on their products’ icing. The commercial culminates in another visit from creepy customers. Creepy at first, anyway. Fred and two colleagues gasp before realizing it is only a quartet of kids in costume, their leader brandishing cash and eager to exchange it for Halloween donuts.
That is a bargain for the bakers. Odds are all of the other houses in the neighborhood could expect three words before they had to dole anything out from their treat trove.
In contrast to candy, though, the pastries are worth the price of minted paper. Short of the aforementioned monster faces or pieces of candy corn, you cannot get more classically Halloween than with orange sprinkles — some shaped like pumpkins — or drizzles of icing atop chocolate frosting. Between Fred’s stints on the screen, those decorations are on full display as the camera pans overhead and a voiceover spokesman describes the offerings.
Conversely, color-wise, the Spicy Ghost Pepper Donut is in Valentine’s Day territory. Its aesthetics look like someone Xeroxed a page from the year-round Pop Tarts playbook. As such, it missed the memo from the fourth, shorter-form ad in the 90s Nostalgia YouTube compilation.
In that spot, the offscreen spokeswoman says, “At Dunkin Donuts, we believe everyone should get dressed up for Halloween, even our donuts.” And once again, there is no shortage of orange when she announces the deal of “50 Halloween-decorated Munchkins for only three-eighty-nine.”
Of course, the orange has not gone away since then. Besides unveiling the Spicy Ghost, Dunkin’s website took care to mention the Spider Donut and detail its backstory.
“When we developed the Spider Donut in the Dunkin’ Test Kitchen,” reads the blog post, “we wanted to incorporate classic Halloween colors and themes. So naturally we were drawn to deep orange and chocolate colors for the ingredients.”
The Spider’s return from 2019 comes with the “Boo It Yourself” kit, namely a make-your-own Halloween donut supply stash. Amidst an upheaval unique to 2020, customers can equip themselves with most of what they saw on their small screens 20-plus years ago. In addition, the creature’s presence is a visual step up from the chocolate-icing web that topped the orange frosting on one of the mid-’90s specials.
The Spider Donut is one Dunkin-devoted millennials and their elders ought to wish existed in Fred’s time. Had that been the case, it is at least a moderately safe bet there would have been an ad lampooning The Fly.
As it is, Vale retired Fred in 1997, but the establishment he helped make famous carried on with its special October offerings. As it did, the next year’s Halloween commercials started employing the cut-and-dry tagline, “So good, it’s scary.”
That slogan would suit the Spicy Ghost, especially for those with timid taste buds and who would just as soon take a pass. (Count this author among that group.)
Promotion-wise, the new item of 2020 appears more reliant on media coverage and online critique. Naturally, the latter would not have been sufficient during the strong finish of the Fred era.
Implicitly because of the new-age means of spreading the word, we shall not see any Spicy Ghost TV spots that match the ’90s ads. But the same technological advances have exhumed those classic commercials while the era’s products carry on with less pomp.
So even as Dunkin Donuts goes by Dunkin, the addition of the Spicy Ghost does not amount to subtraction. Those who try it shall simply leave more of the look-feel-and-taste-of-Halloween donuts for the rest of us.
And thanks to YouTube and ’90s Nostalgia, those who get their hands on them — whether those hands decorated them or just picked them up — can hold them in one while cueing up some classics with the other.