Things we knew about Vegemite: It's a brown, nearly black food spread that Australians love to put on toast, and Andrew Zimmern of The Travel Channel loves the stuff. Then again, the man also treats roach genitalia as a delicacy.
Today, there's something else we know about Vegemite: It inspires hilariously quirky hockey commercials.
Kraft, which makes the yeast-based spread, has just launched a TV ad campaign that focuses on the Darwin Ice Hockey Club; who, as the Sydney Morning Herald puts it, are the "self-styled never-defeated champions of ice hockey - never mind that they come from usually stifling hot Darwin, which doesn't even have an ice-skating rink."
The story began when a group of people whose favourite pastime was sitting on rocks drinking beer and watching Darwin's sunsets decided it was time to launch into ice hockey.
As the joke developed, Baz Ledwidge, a founding member of the Rocksitters Club, said sticks, skates, pucks and club jumpers were bought for its sporting arm, the Darwin Ice Hockey Club, and team members would limber up before challenges to ice hockey teams worldwide, including ice-hockey-mad Canada.
On declared game days the team would gather on Mindil beach for a scheduled cut-throat final. "Every time the other team wouldn't turn up so they would forfeit and we would duly declare ourselves the winner," Mr Ledwidge, 64, said.
That's just enough backstory to appreciate the nuance and hilarity of this new commercial:
That quite an assemblage of talent Down Under. When do Jemaine and Bret start gathering New Zealand's hockey forces for a dance-off?
And, thinking bigger, when does the NHL schedule some sort of interleague Winter Classic in Darwin, pitting one of its own against the undefeated hockey club? Hey, if nothing else, maybe it's a way to get the Coyotes in a Classic. Although they'd have to be called the Dingos for one night. Hide your babies.
s/t to reader Brad Vigon for the tip.
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