SNL And Spirit Halloween Attack Each Other In Hilarious Feud
When SNL did a bit about Spirit Halloween, the store that takes over vacant retail space in the run-up to Halloween, the spooky retailer struck back, leading to a hilarious feud between the two. While fans of Saturday Night Live were excited about the 50th-anniversary episode of the live sketch comedy show, their jokes about Spirit Halloween elicited a hilarious joke costume response from Spirit. Fueling a 1.7 million view spree for SNL, the Spirit Halloween barb clearly hit its mark.
Watch the SNL skit that started the feud below.
It all started when SNL ran a sketch calling Spirit Halloween out for selling “wigs that will give you a rash” and “single-use fog machines” in communities with blighted local economies. The sketch included a reference to the store’s short-lived existence, occupying a storefront for a few weeks during the height of the Halloween season and then shuttering again. They also pointed out the short-term nature of the jobs they create, and the knock-off costumes that they change a little bit to avoid copyright infringement.
Spirit Halloween’s recent SNL-based parody costume post got a million views, about ten times what their average best-performing posts get.
But if SNL thought that Spirit Halloween was going to take their caricature lying down, they had another thing coming. Spirit released a hilarious post on X, (formerly known as Twitter), with a parody costume of the sketch show titled “ Irrelevant 50-Year-Old TV Show”. The post read, “We’re great at bringing things back from the dead”, and the label included “Dated references, Unknown cast, and Shrinking ratings.”
The Spirit Halloween parody ad was a good bait and switch.
While the mirthful barb might have been intended as a joke, the feud between SNL and Spirit Halloween has precipitated a whopping 1.7 million views of the sketch on YouTube over the course of a week. While SNL has had its problems, the show’s tenacity over its 50-year history means it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon. However, a boost from an unlikely source of internet popularity certainly can’t hurt.
The “feud” between SNL and Spirit Halloween might seem on the surface to be just a funny internet joke, but both SNL and Spirit benefit from the beef. The spooky retailer mostly posts on social media about their favorite candy, and a countdown to Halloween, but its recent SNL-based parody costume post got a million views, about ten times what their average best-performing posts get. For SNL, creating some hype for their YouTube channel is definitely a win, so even though the so-called feud seems to be adversarial, it’s actually a boon for both parties.
Fake ads are a running gag on SNL and the Spirit Halloween ad was a part of this tradition. When watching SNL, you might be subjected to an ad break that starts out seeming like the real deal only to be surprised that it’s actually a parody part way through.
It all started when SNL ran a sketch calling Spirit Halloween out for selling “wigs that will give you a rash” and “single-use fog machines” in communities with blighted local economies.
The Spirit Halloween parody ad was a good bait and switch, with the beginning appearing to be a possible campaign ad targeting the economy, discussing empty stores and depressed communities, but then switching to the Spirit Halloween gag.
Whether or not the feud was intentional, the phenomenon of accidentally popular content fueling interest from previously uninterested audiences like the SNL-Spirit Halloween feud isn’t new. There was the time that a Grizzly Bear ate a GoPro and the BBC nature photographer who salvaged the footage became an overnight internet sensation, boosting the performance of the BBC wildlife channel as well as hits to the GoPro website. And there are countless other examples of an unlikely partnership between seemingly unconnected entities giving each other a leg up on social media success.
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