Commercials
Part of Mentos' popularity can be attributed to its campy commercials, which debuted in late 1992 on American television. In the commercials, individuals facing various day-to-day dilemmas consume Mentos and are subsequently inspired to solve their problems at hand in a creative, often humorous fashion.
Dilemmas presented included a woman who breaks her shoe-heel and a man who gets paint on his new business suit after sitting down on a freshly-painted bench. After consuming a Mentos, the female character proceeds to break off the heel to her other undamaged shoe, and the man rolls around on the still-wet bench, creating a pinstripe pattern on his suit. These unusual behaviors are typically witnessed by nearby, sometimes antagonistic characters, and a roll of Mentos is boisterously displayed by the commercial's respective protagonist to the observer as an explanation for their actions.
Many North American viewers believed that the 1990s commercials, with their unfamiliar and rather naive style, had been imported -- perhaps from Northern Europe, the candy's home.[citation needed]
The commercials have been widely parodied in popular culture. In a vignette from an episode of Family Guy, John Wilkes Booth botches the assassination of Abraham Lincoln until assisted by a candy called "Mintos" which is presented with the Mentos slogan, "the freshmaker." The Foo Fighters' 1996 music video "Big Me" also parodied the Mentos commercials, using an imaginary candy called Footos. In this video, the methods employed to solve problems are virtually direct copies of those portrayed in the actual commercials. There exist also a number of amateur-made parodies on the World Wide Web. Mentos were also parodied in the Leslie Nielsen movie Wrongfully Accused and the movie Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, and also in a host segment on the cult classic television series Mystery Science Theater 3000. A TV ad for Democratic Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont featuring blogger Markos Moulitsas was re-cut by various bloggers into a parody of a Mentos commercial.[1] It has been used in the movie Cody Banks 2; Destination London.
Recent American commercials for Mentos have diverged from the widely-parodied format entirely, and feature a rendition of 2 Unlimited's No Limit.