SURPRISINGLY, NOT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD HAS SEEN THE MOVIE NAPOLEON DYNAMITE. SO JUST FOR SOME CONTEXT, HERE’S THE SCENE THAT INSPIRED IT ALL:

I’m still trying to figure out what was more fun. Coming up with the idea with a bunch of co-workers who were some of my closest friends, or getting the idea approved and actually making it. I guess for this project, they were one and the same.

But anyways, one of Burger King’s most popular menu items that was discontinued, right behind Chicken Fries, were Cheesy Tots. And thanks to our amazing strategy team at Code & Theory, we were able to recognize that tens of thousands of tweets were posted every day about how Burger King needed to bring Cheesy Tots back. Low and behold, the data was enough to convince the clients to slate the product in for a limited-time return on the menu.

So now that the product was coming back, part of the brief was meant to target to the O.G. tot-lovers that were waiting impatiently for a non-guaranteed return of their favorite food.

Then after doing some digging, one of the trends we recognized was that the most common way that people on twitter would demand for BK to bring back Cheesy Tots was through Napoleon Dynamite gifs and memes.

And if you were like most American’s in their 20’s, you would automatically know that this was because of the infamous tot scene in the middle of the movie.

Needless to say, we came back to the clients with our plan to use Napoleon and Pedro to recreate the tot scene from 2004 as our announcement, and they were sold.

We originally wanted Jon Heder and Efren Ramirez, a.k.a Napoleon and Pedro, to dress up like their original characters. But due to rights with their production company, we were only allowed to nod to the original scene. Either way, I loved how the work turned out, and getting to hang out with Jon and Efren for the day is always a plus.