The Subservient Chicken

» see subservientchicken.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 8 April 2004 Burger King put up a web page with a text box and a grainy video window. In the window stood a man in a chicken suit, apparently in somebody's living room, apparently waiting. You typed an instruction and he carried it out. The page was built by The Barbarian Group for Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and it existed to sell the TenderCrisp chicken sandwich under the company's old "Have it Your Way" line, reworked for this purpose into "Chicken the way you like it."

The trick was that it looked live and was not. Behind the box sat more than 300 pre-recorded clips, so the chicken could moonwalk, riverdance, lay an egg, or urinate on the couch, and your typed words were matched against a list rather than obeyed. People spent a long time trying to find the edge of that list, which was what the campaign wanted and the reason the link kept getting forwarded.

April 2004 found me a university student in Ankara with a 56k modem at home and broadband still a couple of years off. Video was the one thing that line could not do casually. A page made entirely of clips meant sitting there while it loaded, and nobody sits through a load for an advertisement. The cafes I used were for Counter-Strike and for pulling down mp3s, so the chicken reached me secondhand and late.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three hundred commands ~

The command list is the artifact worth keeping. It ran from dancing to household misbehavior, all of it filmed in advance by somebody working from the correct assumption that a chicken who refuses nothing is less interesting than one you can corner. Visitors treated it as a puzzle with a hidden boundary, and the campaign got its reach from people reporting back on where that boundary was.

The suit itself was a problem. According to CP+B executive creative director Jeff Benjamin, the original performer turned out to be claustrophobic, so the job went to one of the costume's own designers. He managed about six moves at a time, Benjamin said, and then they stopped and fanned him off.

~ the second coming ~

He came back in 2005 for a campaign called Fantasy Ranch, attached to the TenderCrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch sandwich, and again in 2014 for the tenth anniversary of the original, this time selling the Chicken BIG KING. The 2014 page was titled Chicken Redemption and its copy read: "He rose to fame. He fell from grace. The subservient chicken is back and he isn't taking orders anymore." A character invented to take orders was relaunched on the premise that he had stopped.

~ the domain gives up ~

That 2014 page was the last thing subservientchicken.com ever served. The archived copies stop changing in June 2014 and then repeat, byte for byte, for six years: the same Chicken Redemption headline over the same dead video container, about 2,800 bytes of it every time. The final capture of the site's own page is dated 23 June 2020.

By 1 July 2020, eight days later, the same address was handing out a redirect instead. It still is. Request either subservientchicken.com or the www form today and both land on bk.com, which serves about five and a half kilobytes of ordinary corporate homepage.

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