Spongmonkeys

About

Spongmonkeys are small, furry creatures with large human eyes created by animator Joel Veitch. They appeared in a series of bizarre internet videos in the early 2000s and were famously used in an advertisement for Quiznos, creating a memorable commercial that went viral fifteen years after it initially aired as people remembered the bizarreness of the ad. The videos commonly have the Spongmonkeys talking or singing in a high pitched voice.

Origin

The titular creatures are known as "Spongmonkeys" and the term originates on b3ta.com.^[1] Their name comes from the words "spong" and "monkey". The video depicts the creatures singing and playing the guitar. "Spong" is a popular term from b3ta that means "The practice of adding large staring eyes with small pupils to an image". The practice of Sponging was already popular amongst b3ta users prior to the creation of the video. Joel Veitch, is a web animator and singer-songwriter created the original video, featuring two Spongmonkeys singing a song titled "We Like the Moon,"^[2] and posted it January 24th, 2003.^[3] It was uploaded to the Rathergood YouTube account on November 3rd, 2007, where it was viewed over 1.1 million times (shown below).

Spread

As the video spread in popularity, it was adapted into a Quiznos commercial with the lyrics, "We love the subs! ‘Cuz they are good to us. The Quiznos subs. They are tasty, they are crunchy, they are warm because they toast them. They got a pepper bar!" The commercial, which aired roughly throughout 2004, received mixed reaction from audience members but was nevertheless memorable. Slate^[4] wrote a piece about the different reactions writer Seth Stevenson had received about the commercial, ranging from "What are these creatures?", to "You've gotta be kidding me," to "This is genius advertising!" By the end of 2004, the ads were discontinued.^[5]

While "We love the subs!" later surged in popularity, it was one of several videos Veitch created for the campaign (other examples shown below).

The campaign has been covered multiple times as one of the most bizarre ad campaigns of the modern era in videos by Nostalgia Critic and Good Mythical Morning (shown below, right).

On June 16th, 2019, Twitter user @sullivem tweeted the ad with the caption "millennials don’t own homes because this quiznos commercial put a hex on us as children," gaining over 30,000 retweets and 118,000 likes (shown below). The tweet led to a resurgence in commentary about the ad. User @Stone1492^[6] tweeted "This 2003 Quiznos ad single-handedly set gay rat weddings back 16 years," gaining over 100 retweets and 720 likes. User @Saint_SIl^[7] wrote wrote "I entirely forgot that quiznos was advertising with a short lived internet meme long before the current state of corporate twitter." The resurgence of the ad led to articles from Huffington Post,^[8] AV Club,^[9] and Eater,^[10] among others.

Search Interest

External References