Do bikinis still sell beer when beheaded crappies are involved?

by Jay Gabler, TC Daily Planet • June 29, 2008 • One of the great media brouhahas of my youth was the debate over whether we children were being warped by advertisements on television. In 1991, Old Milwaukee was castigated for its advertisements featuring the Swedish Bikini Team, which allegedly tipped teenage boys luckier than me over the precipice into lives of drunken, sex-crazed dissolution. The furor died down sometime around the broadcast of the Saturday Night Live “Schmitts Gay” parody, and we all moved on to bigger and better moral panics.

But now Schell’s Brewing Company is testing the waters—so to speak—for bikini-clad women bearing beer. The twist this time is that the women’s curvaceous torsos are attached to the unwilling bodies of freshwater fish. Bottles of the limited-edition Lakemaid Beer feature “Miss Perch,” “Miss Smallmouth Bass,” and other wondrous beauties including—yes—“Miss Crappie.” (Warning: You’ll be subjected to a rigorous age test before being allowed to enter the site.) Flush from the success of Grain Belt Premium—which now takes up the majority of the New Ulm brewery’s beer-making capacity—Schell’s is backing Lakemaid with an extensive advertising campaign, all the better for us to appreciate the hours of Photoshopping that went into this effort. The beer itself is not too bad; Drinkhacker.com calls it “a beer with apple and citrus notes, moderately creamy but otherwise quite refreshing.”

Arts Orbit is a multisource blog about the local arts scene, featuring both original contributions by Daily Planet writers and entries reprinted from partner blogs and online publications.

“Woman,” wrote Dorothy Dinnerstein in The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise, “is the will’s first, overwhelming adversary. She teaches us that our intentions can be thwarted not only by the inconvenient properties of objects but also by the opposed intentions of other living creatures.” This, to me, raises the question: In all this, who’s taking the crappies’ intentions into consideration?