A cute commercial from Mars promoting the M&Ms-Indiana Jones tie-in, featuring the animated M&Ms reprising the famous scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The commercial can be viewed online here. It’s a good thing snakes are indifferent to chocolate.
(P.S. That looks like a corn snake at the end of the ad.)
Albert’s helpful pet viper, Adolphe, saves the day in this comedy set on Devil’s Island, but he does all of his dirty work — extinguishing the lives of the two villains — off-screen. In fact, we never actually see Adolphe: all his screen time is spent inside his cage, which makes identifying him a moot point. He’s described as “a little snake, about this big,” and “all different colours like a pretty bracelet,” which sounds more like a coral snake than a viper, insofar as French Guyanese snakes are concerned, but there it is. But a snake with a taste for music? “Vipers are very musical reptiles; they’re much more musical than people think,” says Jules (played by Peter Ustinov). I suppose: snakes are as deaf as Beethoven.
I know I’m pushing my luck with a second porn entry, but this (edited clip) from the seventies porn film, The Devil in Miss Jones, plays on the usual Judeo-Christian temptation metaphors — this scene apparently takes place in Hell — as well as the also-usual, but more crass, phallic snake imagery that we got a taste of in our previous entry. Lord knows what the young boa constrictor is thinking during this ordeal.
Pornographic movies play with Freudian snake symbolism, but do so so badly. Take, for example, this clip that has been making the rounds of the Internets; it’s from a 1997 porn flick called (sigh) Pussy Beat 2. “You gotta really watch out for the garter snakes,” says the diminutive English teacher (garter snakes?!), but the giant snake that descends upon him and his Hungarian exchange student (sigh) could have come straight from the IKEA catalogue. Laugh as he rolls around battling the obviously fake snake! Wince as he utters the cheese-o-rama line that segues from this lame introduction to — well, this clip is on YouTube, so it fades to black at this point. You know what happens next.
