The Hershey's Kisses 'Christmas Bells' Commercial Was a Last-Minute Improv
That Hershey’s Kisses holiday commercial -- you know, the one where a choir of chocolates “ring” in succession like bells playing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” -- has been a crucial part of the American holiday experience ever since it first aired in 1989. That might sound silly (“Of course, Americans can’t celebrate a holiday without a TV,” we hear you smug Europeans say), but people really do go nuts for this thing. The top comments under the most-viewed YouTube video of the commercial read, “This commercial completes my Christmas every year,” “It's not Christmas unless I watch this commercial at least once,” and “If this ever stops airing I will cry no joke.” When Hershey tried to have some fun by remixing it in 2020, they encountered such violent pushback that they had to make a whole new commercial to address it. You don’t mess with our Christmas candy.
It’s pretty impressive for a concept that was made up on the spot. At the time it was created, Hershey brand manager John Dunn was at Colossal Pictures in San Francisco to oversee the production of a completely unrelated advertising campaign that happened to be focused on the idea of “whimsy,” hence the use of tabletop stop-motion animation and late ‘80s CGI. When the animators, Carl Willat and Gordon Clark, finished their work ahead of schedule, Dunn decided that clearly meant they didn’t have enough and asked them to throw together a Christmas commercial. Willat and Clark haven’t made their feelings about this last-minute request known, and the royalties they’ve presumably earned in the intervening decades are probably sufficient to keep their mouths shut, but a photo of someone like Dunn pierced by several steel darts is almost certainly hanging in every animation office in the world.
They weren’t the only ones who had cause to dropkick Dunn, either. Technically, he didn’t have the authority to order the commercial, just a hunch that he could probably “sell it to his boss.” Again, we don’t know if or how many additional company resources went into the commercial, but if the idea had been a turd, Dunn’s career might have been over with the ring of a bell. Fortunately, it was the opposite of a turd (a delicious candy?), proving once again that approaching life with the deranged confidence of an ‘80s advertising executive always pays.