Grinding Through Gristle for the Ad Mill

Have you had your break today? Commercial break, that is.

Here’s how McDonald’s hamburgers and Disney’s “Hunchback” are being marketed on television in campaigns that are, well, curious. First, the burgers.

Oscar-nominated “Babe” was more than just a cute fantasy about a huggable piglet that saved its own bacon by becoming a porker version of a championship sheep dog.

The hit Universal movie with an “unprejudiced heart” also delivered a powerful message: All creatures deserve respect, all have worth and destinies beyond what humans preordain for them.

So talk about your oddities, what is “Babe” doing on TV in a McDonald’s commercial for the “Babe Happy Meal”? Many pig watchers were jolted to see a 30-second spot, replete with voices and cuddly snippets from the movie, offering parents of kiddies a stuffed “Babe” barnyard character with every purchase of a “hamburger Happy Meal.” Buy one, “and your kids can pretend they’re Babe,” the ad’s announcer tells parents.

“I was appalled, and I hope it backfires,” said James Cromwell, whose work as Farmer Hoggett in the film earned him an Oscar nomination. “The reaction of many people to this movie, especially children, was that they were made aware that meat comes from animals, a connection that McDonald’s for many years has been trying to cloud over.”

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Adds Gretchen Wyler, president of the Ark Trust, a media-watching animal rights group that gave “Babe” a Genesis Award this year: “Obviously, McDonald’s didn’t see the film. Why would it use a film with a vegetarian message to promote the eating of dead animals?”

Why, indeed, this incongruous pairing of “Babe” and burgers? “We have some Happy Meal toys that are available with the purchase of a Happy Meal,” said Malesia Webb-Dunn, a McDonald’s spokeswoman in a phone interview from the company’s Oak Brook, Ill., headquarters. “They’re simply intended to be fun for families and for children.” She wouldn’t elaborate.

MCA/Universal is the official licenser of “Babe.” But, Kennedy Miller, the Australian production company associated with “Babe,” also had “approval on the spots,” said the company’s Los Angeles spokesman, Johnny Friedkin. “It’s not that they sneaked this by us. We knew about it, but not how big we were going to be in it. And things get forgotten. Then all of a sudden, a date was upon us.”

How did Kennedy Miller respond to the spot? “We couldn’t believe it,” Friedkin said. “We thought, ‘How silly.’ If ever a film is against eating meat, ‘Babe’ is it.”

Until, that is, the movie met the golden arches, where, as the “Babe” slogan says on Happy Meal displays inside McDonald’s, which has bacon and sausage on its menu, “A little pig goes a long way.”

As does the sales reach of multi-tentacled Disney.

The corporate giant is ringing more bells than Quasimodo on behalf of its new animated feature, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” blanketing TV with “Hunchback” hype this summer the way aliens cover U.S. cities with their massive spaceships in “Independence Day,” a just-released sci-fi movie getting its own major promo push on the small screen.

Although anointed a “special,” for example, “The Making of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ “--run by Disney-owned ABC Tuesday night after “Roseanne”--was, in effect, a half-hour infomercial, an unlabeled, program-length commercial for the recently released Disney version of Victor Hugo’s classic.

This blurring of TV programs and commercials has a long history. For years now studios have advertised movies on TV through infomercials disguised as behind-the-scenes glimpses at “the making of. . . .” Other program-length commercials, deceptively mislabeled as specials, also have surfaced in prime time. And the early years of TV are studded with examples of advertisers being allowed to merge their commercial messages with the programs they sponsored, a practice clumsily mocked last season by Dana Carvey’s short-lived comedy series on ABC.

Yet Disney has polished this TV hucksterism to a high gloss, going so far even as to buy time within newscasts for ads pitching its films in a commercial format designed to resemble movie critics’ reviews. Was that the station’s movie critic or Disney’s? Un-alert viewers may not be able to make the distinction.

Disney leaves no TV demographic unturned when promoting its big-screen ventures. Thus, “The Making of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ ” has already aired on Disney-owned KCAL-TV Channel 9 and several times on the Disney Channel as part of a “Hunchback of Notre Dame celebration” that also included something titled “A Special Festival of Fools” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame Festival of Fun” from New Orleans. This self-congratulatory collection of sales pitches is being rerun Thursday night on KCAL, preempting news programming, and “The Making of . . . “ is also to be repeated on ABC Saturday morning--no leaving wee ones outside this sales loop--following the animated kids’ program “What-a-Mess.”

What a sales message.

It was delivered on “The Making of . . . “ largely by Jason Alexander, the “Seinfeld” star who voices Hugo the gargoyle in the animated feature. Joining Alexander were the filmmakers and other cast members, all taking part in this promo-slanted rehash of how the feature was created.

What will Disney think of next, artificial humps for members of its major league baseball team, the Angels? Or better still, a TV program with this title: “The Making of the Making of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame.’ ”