Remember going to the movies as a 90s kid? The usual samosa-soft drink combo, the salted popcorn, the candy ice-creams… the Vicco Vajradanti ad? Is there a more inspired rhyming scheme than Vicco turmeric… nahi cosmetic? Tell us you didn’t sing that and we’ll call you a liar. Most people growing up during the late 90s and the 00s were ambushed with the ad’s yellow aesthetic, something we eventually developed a taste for… like haldi doodh. The Vicco Vajradanti ad’s been a significant part of our movie-going experience, something that’s been parodied over and over, and still remains catchy.
Then Bollywood happened. The bosses at Vicco probably thought that they needed an update on their iconic commercial to connect with the ‘uuthz’. So they hired Alia Bhatt to star in a ‘music video’, where the favourite Dharma kid does the occasional shimmy to a generic Bollywood-ised version of the iconic jingle. Gone are apples, Bhatt goes around biting into tacos to test her swasth masoode. There are a score of back-up dancers helping Bhatt, making the ad look like another one of those Student Of The Year 3 entry sequences. Take away the volume, and this could be a generic ad for just about anything. Including SOTY.
We had made our peace with the original ad’s tacky but beloved yellow aesthetic, embraced the verbose jingle that required us to sing ayurvedic jadibutiyon se banaa sampoorna swadeshi in one breath, the second most important challenge since Shankar Mahadevan’s Breathless.
In fact, having seen it in theatres for over two decades, it would actually be worth spending some time thinking about how we’re going to spend our precious minutes in a theatre before a movie begins. Watching Maanyavar and JustDial ads? Nope. Sorry. Completely unacceptable.
Who doesn’t want to see that uncle dressed in white, crack open a walnut using his strong teeth?! WE WANT OUR ORIGINAL VICCO VAJRADANTI AD BACK!
