Big Mouth Billy Bass Battles a Big Ol' Bear for Jeep Cherokee

It's more of a mauling, actually

Die, Big Mouth Billy Bass, die! Who didn’t scream those words at the musical wall-mounted oddity back in the day. Now, BMBB returns and meets an awful (some might say richly deserved) fate in a spot for Jeep Cherokee that’s garnered millions of views online in just a few days.

It’s kind of graphic, though not really. Remember, those are wires inside the freaky fish, not intestines. And a bear’s gotta eat, right?

Hang in for the surprise ending, it’s so patriotic:

That kid learned a valuable lesson: Life sucks, even for animatronic fish.

“This spot was built very intentionally around the 140 driver-assistance features of the all-new Jeep Cherokee Hybrid—because safety matters. But it has to be expressed in a way that’s true to Jeep,” says Olivier Francois, global CMO at Jeep parent Stellantis.

With that in mind, the team “delivers humor and a bit of chaos, but always in service of a concrete message. If there were a prize for ‘the best Big Game commercial that’s not in the Big Game,’ this is the ad we’d submit.”

We agree and so does the cyber-sphere. The spot’s a hoot and it’s generated loads of attention in barely a day.

AI, CGI and puppetry all came into play, skillfully deployed by ace comedy director Jim Jenkins from O Positive. Highdive led creative development.