Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Famed ad one highlight of man’s 40-year career
BELLA VISTA — Chan Hatcher of Bella Vista had a 40-year career in television advertising, with one of the highlights being an award for the well-known Budweiser frogs commercial.
When Hatcher was a boy, his father brought home the family’s first television set, and the first thing they saw on the TV was a beer commercial, he said. He told his dad he was going to make commercials someday.
Hatcher served in the Army during the Korean War era and then, while in college after his three-year service, he did an internship at an advertising company called Leo Burnett in Chicago.
They liked his work, and he left the internship feeling good about advertising.
After graduating from college, he started full-time at Leo Burnett, which was responsible for creating the Jolly Green Giant, Charlie the Tuna, the Keebler Elves, Tony the Tiger and the Maytag repairman. He started as an audio engineer, then was promoted to a business manager on the Kellogg’s account, and then became a producer. He worked there for about 12 years.
Then he got an offer from GTR Productions to be a director/cameraman. He was there about two years when he got an offer from Cunningham and Walsh.
They were looking for someone to organize the production department and run all the productions coming out of the Chicago office. He spent 12 years with that company and became senior vice president/director of broadcast productions.
Then he was appointed director of operations and found himself running the agency. After 12 years there, the company lost its biggest account, Brown and Williamson, which makes Kool cigarettes, and the New York headquarters decided to downsize.
Hatcher was offered a job as senior vice president of broadcast productions at D’Arcy Masius Benton and Bowles in St. Louis, which was a big change because he had always been from Chicago. The company’s biggest account was Budweiser, and they also had other big accounts, including Michelob and M&M Mars.
The story of the Budweiser frogs ad goes back to the ad team’s art director, Hatcher said. The art director told the team’s writer there was a pond on his family’s farm when he was growing up, and he remembered there was a frog that seemed to be saying “bud, bud, bud.” And he thought it would be a good idea for a Budweiser ad to have a frog saying “bud.”
The writer told him he was crazy, but after he slept on the idea, he came back and suggested three frogs, one saying “bud” one saying “weis” and one saying “er.” They approached Hatcher to discuss how to make the idea happen.
Hatcher learned there was a new technology called animatronics used on the movie “Jurassic Park” and he got in touch with a friend in Hollywood who connected him to Gore Verbinski, who was new to the industry at the time but now is a well-known film director and producer. Verbinski made the animatronic frogs a reality.
Next Hatcher put together an estimate for Anheuser-Busch. The company expected three frogs in a pond to be “cheap,” he said.
“I thought they were going to kill me,” when they found out what the estimate was, he said.
However, they got the money approved and went to Stage 36 at Universal Studios, waterproofed the stage, built short walls and filled them with water. Besides the frogs and lily pads, they also put in a swamp shack, because the customer wanted the Budweiser sign in the shot and there had to be somewhere to hang it.
It took six people to operate the three frogs. Three were underneath the stage and would inflate the goiters, open and close the eyes and turn the heads. The other three made the mouths move in sync with an audio track with mouthpieces connected to a computer.
When the commercial was completed, Hatcher got a call from the ad agency saying they had lost the Budweiser account.
“It was because of a snafu with our New York office that bought media time for Phillip Morris,” a competitor of Anheuser-Busch, he said.
When the team returned from making the commercial and Hatcher called the brand manager on the Budweiser account, instead of inviting them to screen the commercial with them, he had them send it over in a cab.
“It ran on the Super Bowl and we kind of got famous,” he said.
He won a coveted Clio for the commercial, which is like an Academy Award for ads, he said.
He has also won numerous other advertising and film awards, including a Silver Lion award at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2000, he and his creative partners and the Budweiser frogs were elected to the Clios Hall of Fame.
During his career, Hatcher had the opportunity to meet a number of celebrities, including the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies, Charlton Heston, George Burns, Betty White, June Lockhart and others.
He told Charlton Heston he felt awkward giving him directions on how to read his lines for an advertisement.
Heston replied, “I may have parted the Red Sea but, when it comes to advertising, you’re the boss.”
While he was working at Cunningham and Walsh, his creative director had an idea for an ad with a tobacco brand with George Burns smoking a pipe instead of a cigar for a twist. Hatcher had the opportunity to go to Burns’ home during their time working together.
Hatcher said his kids and grandkids are all in film and advertising now. One son has ads on the Super Bowl every year, and a granddaughter works for Dreamworks.
“It’s incredible how they’ve all picked up on film,” he said.
Hatcher retired in 1995 and moved to Bella Vista in 1998. In 2004, he was awarded the Distinguished Graduate Award from his alma mater, Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Fla.
He is a retired member of the Directors Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild.