I Watched Mario Lopez Role-Play as Colonel Sanders so You Don't Have to
Will the real Colonel Sanders please stand up?
Doctors, lawyers, journalists, public officials and detectives have one thing in common – thanks to their frequent representation in pop culture, most people have at least some inkling of what their jobs entail. Sure, the day-to-day details and responsibilities aren’t that accurate and there’s rarely as much office romance or camaraderie in reality as there is on screen or on the page, but you can tell a stranger at a party what your profession is without having to explain what it is you actually do. As someone who works in sponsored content, I didn’t have that luxury – until now.
Finally, I can simply say, “Oh, you know A Recipe for Seduction, that Lifetime original mini-movie presented by KFC and starring Mario Lopez in the role of Colonel Sanders? That’s basically what I do.”
Never mind that the type of sponsored content I produce bears little resemblance to a mini Lifetime movie – it’s having that pop culture point of reference that counts. As a gesture of gratitude to the fine people at Lifetime and KFC for granting me this gift, I decided to watch A Recipe for Seduction and witness for myself this unholiest of branded unions.
Meet Jessica Mancera, our down on her luck heiress (an oxymoron that Lifetime is fond of featuring) with a Dead Dad whose only legacy is his debt and a Manipulative Mother named Bunny who’s definitely up to no good. How, exactly, did the Manceras make their money before Dear Old Debtor of a Dead Dad lost all of it? A Recipe for Seduction doesn’t concern itself with such inanities, and neither should you. The important thing is that they’re in danger of losing the trappings of wealth to which they have become accustomed. Out of curiosity, though, I did some digging and found that the surname “Mancera” could be of Italian, Spanish or Portuguese origin, according to ancestry.com, so I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch that Lifetime might have intended some mafia connections there.
Evil mother Bunny wants Jessica to accept a marriage proposal from the pompous, possessive and, above all, very rich Billy Garibaldi III (an excellent villain name, which I will type out in full at every reference, out of respect to the script writers) but Jessica can’t quite make herself submit to her familial duty. “It’s so unfair! Our family’s livelihood shouldn’t depend on who I choose to marry,” Jessica says, in a neat summation of something us literary types like to call a theme.
Enter: Harland Sanders, AKA the new chef, looking less snowy-haired and pasty-skinned than ever before. Just because the Manceras are on the brink of economic ruin doesn’t mean that they should go without a personal chef – what are they, animals?
Jessica and Harland exchange heated eye contact, and with no less than 15 different cuts of them looking at each other in a mere 46-second scene, even the least discerning of viewers can understand what is being communicated: these two people find each other attractive. Jessica soon invites Harland on a “tour” of “the property,” which, to my considerable disappointment, was not an innuendo. The two objectively hot actors with no chemistry to speak of proceed to divulge their characters’ deepest secrets to each other while strolling the grounds. Jessica has a sinking feeling that Billy Garibaldi III isn’t The One. Harland is harboring a secret recipe he claims is going “to change the world,” which Jessica believes without any proof or further inquiries.
Billy Garibaldi III finds them and attempts to assert his dubious ownership over Jessica, warning her not to make “the biggest mistake of [her] life.” I mention this otherwise unremarkable scene because it includes the following exchange:
I demand a Pulitzer for everyone involved.
What follows is your basic the-sky’s-the-limit series of plot escalations and soap tropes. The line is drawn between the villains (Evil Bunny and Billy Garibaldi III, who also happen to be previous sexual partners) and the heroes (Jessica, Harland and Lee, Jessica’s gay Black bestie – take a shot for that trope rearing its unimaginative head again). The secret recipe becomes a crucial plot point. Harland, like an idiot, refuses a check for $500,000 to leave town and never darken Jessica’s doorway again and gets bound and gagged for his trouble. With a polo mallet in hand and righteousness on their side, Lee and Jessica save Harland from being murdered in cold blood by the Bunny-Billy duo. In the one year later epilogue, Jessica marries Harland and bravely kisses a mouthful of Mario Lopez’s fake mustache one last time. But wait – is that a sequel set up I hear? Just before we fade to the credits, Billy Garibaldi III visits Evil Bunny in her confinement to tell her he’s got Harland’s secret recipe. Dun dun dun!
Here are some of the lessons I gleaned from this glorified 15-minute commercial:
Lifetime law states that if people are having sex before marriage, then they’re probably villainous to their very core – just look at Evil Bunny and Billy Garibaldi III.
Polo mallets are for the girls and the gays.
If a man dresses like he’s a long-lost Romney, there’s a very high probability that he’s a murderer in the making.
Sponsored content did what Quibi could not – make a mini-movie that I actually watched.
The titular recipe for seduction seems to be conveniently showing up when a conflicted heiress is on the brink of a life-changing decision and just … being Mario Lopez?
Speaking of Mario Lopez, can he not do a Southern accent? I’m not mad, just disappointed. It kind of compromises the integrity of the entire project tbh.
And finally, if you are offered a check for $500,000 where the only stipulation is that you never return to household where you’re mocked as the “chicken man” and “crouton” by a would-be murderer in pastel, take it and don’t look back.
The fun of A Recipe for Seduction is in its self-awareness. Lifetime, KFC and the mini-movie production company confusingly named JEAN, which I initially thought was just some pretentious French director who goes by one name only, all understand that they’re making a send up of Lifetime’s signature soaps. This collaboration is only the latest in a KFC advertising campaign, managed by ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, that aims to make Colonel Sanders a hunky heartthrob. In 2017, the campaign formally launched with the publication of a 96-page novella entitled Tender Wings of Desire.
The ad agency outsourced the writing of Tender Wings of Desire to Catherine Kovach, a former Bustle.com feature writer, who calls it “one of the more interesting commissions” she’s done on the novella’s Goodreads listing. Set in Victorian England, it tells the story of Lady Madeline Parker (another young heiress) who chooses Colonel Sanders, a “handsome sailor with a mysterious past,” over a life of order. Thematically, it has the same narrative premise as A Recipe for Seduction – a rich woman of an unknown, young-ish age is faced with the difficult but inevitable choice to forgo a life of conventionality and instead pursue passionate romance with Colonel Sanders (giving a whole new meaning to chicken wing-scented kisses). There are so many weird and hilarious things about this – the setting being Victorian England and not Kentucky (famously, where Kentucky Fried Chicken is from), the choice to make Colonel Sanders a naval hero and, most importantly, the fact that Tender Wings of Desire was created as a Mother’s Day promotion.
Apparently, Mother’s Day is KFC’s best-selling day of the year. To capitalize off this tentpole sales day, KFC offered a free copy of Tender Wings of Desire with orders of fried chicken costing at least $20, “so she can finally get what she wants this year – a family meal she doesn’t have to cook, and some alone time with a captivating novella.” And the company didn’t stop there. Other promotions since 2017’s Tender Wings of Desire have included an anime-style dating simulator game where players can try to date and seduce the Colonel (“I Love You Colonel Sanders”) and a computer-generated influencer version of Colonel Sanders (????).
It’s a lot of effort to make a joke that can be boiled down to a simple proposition: what if Colonel Sanders, but sexy? At the very least, this marketing strategy has been effective in garnering attention – Twitter had a field day with the trailer for A Recipe for Seduction. I don’t know if it’s actually funny enough to warrant such high concept ad campaigns spanning years and different cultural mediums, though. I thought A Recipe for Seduction and its knowing ridiculousness was entertaining, but I have a feeling there will be diminishing returns on hammering this concept home repeatedly. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we acted like you and especially your mom wanted to fuck Colonel Sanders? Yeah, I guess. What about if we stick him and his guns on a pulpy romance novel cover? Lol romance novels, amirite? And then what if we make him the hero of a Lifetime made-for-TV movie? OK, cool, but basically the same premise. They’ll run out of cheeky mom-targeted content formats eventually – then what? Maybe they’re counting on our collective cultural attention span being so short that we’ll be delighted anew at each iteration, or hoping that the inexhaustible reserves of energy people have for poking fun at things women like will fuel this tank as long as possible.
Another factor that keeps the whole Colonel Sanders sexpot schtick from being as hilariously absurdist as KFC’s marketing team thinks it is is the fact that Colonel Sanders is the literal founder of the company. It’s one thing to give a bimbofication makeover to the Hamburglar, a fictional cartoon character, and quite another to indiscriminately sex up the likeness of a real person who passed away 40 years ago.
Colonel Harland Sanders, born in 1890, was a hot-headed handyman prone to brawling and burning bridges. Though he did serve in the armed forces for a year, the Colonel title isn’t a military distinction – the governor of Kentucky bestows the honor to individuals who bring recognition and contribute to Kentucky society, so Sanders became a Colonel by virtue of his chicken frying skills alone. He found success in the Kentucky fried chicken business after decades of being fired from jobs for subordination and ruining his own professional reputation by picking physical fights as a lawyer, fireman, railroad laborer and ferryboat entrepreneur. I don’t know about you, but this is not someone I feel super comfortable with framing as a romantic hero, even as part of some elaborate joke.
After franchising his secret recipe (for fried chicken, not seduction, as far as I’m aware) and selling his company to venture capitalists, the real Colonel Sanders eventually distanced himself from what he viewed as KFC’s increasingly mass-produced, low quality products. He even sued KFC’s parent company in 1973 for the alleged misuse of his image in promoting products he hadn’t helped develop. So I can only imagine the absolute consternation with which he would greet A Recipe for Seduction. On one hand, everything about his background indicates that he was probably racist – so if he’s rolling over in his grave because Mario Lopez played him in a saucy Lifetime romp of an ad, then so be it. Roll away.
On the other hand, I find it difficult to ignore the ambivalence he expressed near the end of his life about how closely to link himself to a company that he felt was traveling further and further away from his original conception of it with each passing year. Should KFC – and any other companies using similar marketing ploys – have ethical guidelines for using, reproducing and warping the image of a real person on a regular basis? To what end is the Sexy Colonel Sanders gag deployed? Shock, curiosity, amusement, brand affinity and above all, enticement to buy more chicken. The only entity that materially benefits from the use of his likeness in 2020 is the corporation built on his secret recipe, and there’s no room for considerations of personal dignity and respect in a world where profit margins are the end all be all of the decision-making process. If you want to know who to blame for Mario Lopez as Colonel Sanders, in other words, then look no further than the age-old culprit of America’s most enduring sins. As the hosts of You’re Wrong About are fond of saying, it was capitalism all along.
Now, only one question remains: would you have sex with Mario Lopez as Colonel Sanders?