Ashton Kutcher, disguised by a variety of stereotypical getups and bad accents, wants you to eat Pop Chips. Perhaps you were craving a little racial controversy with your snack food? Watch!
Ashton Kutcher introduced his four alter ego’s to the world in a PopChips Ad Campaign, but instead of getting laughs, he got accused of being racist!
Ashton Kutcher and Pop Chips had this super great idea for a commercial: Dress the Two and a Half Men star up in a variety of stereotypical outfits (complete with a “brownface” Indian man) and pretend to film a dating website commercial that has little, if anything, to do with snack food. What could go wrong?
Plenty, of course. Ashton Kutcher and Pop Chips’ hard work creating a commercial that appears to be all for naught — unless it was controversy the advertising folks we’re aiming for in the first place! The offensive ad has been pulled from Pop Chips’ website and other online channels after backlash from viewers, though it lives on at YouTube, as evidenced below.
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One irate viewer commented on Kutcher’s impersonation of Bollywood producer “Raj” writing, “I can’t imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad ‘funny’ accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course.”
A statement on the company’s website from the CEO reads, “We received a lot feedback about the dating campaign parody we launched today and appreciate everyone who took the time to share their point of view. Our team worked hard to create a lighthearted parody featuring a variety of characters that was meant to provide a few laughs. We did not intend to offend anyone. I take full responsibility and apologize to anyone we offended.”
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Of course, where some take offense others do not. One YouTube user, pointing out that other actors have portrayed people of different ethnicities in various roles, wrote, “So Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy [and] Robert Downey Jr. can do it, but when Ashton does it, it’s considered racist? I know he’s not a popular actor, but that doesn’t automatically ban him from doing impressions.”
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