Have it Your Way: Subservient Chicken

Hublet: "Are you playing with that chicken AGAIN?"

Burger King has created a novel online marketing tool for promoting their newest fast food chicken sandwich. Meet the Subservient Chicken.

This online chicken is one processed nugget. Someone dressed up in a chicken costume appears to stand in front of a Web cam when you log onto the site and proceeds to do just about any rated G thing you tell it to by typing your instructions into a command field. And if you try to make chicken do something naughty, chicken will give you a stern finger shaking tsk tsk!

Here's some of the instructions I typed:

"Sit on the floor."

"Kiss my monitor."

"Walk like an Egyptian."

"Throw the sofa pillows on the floor."

"Sit in Indian-style on the chair."

"Do the Hokey Pokey."

"Lay on the sofa."

"Jump up and down three times and touch your nose."

As expected, chicken obeyed. But after the novelty of making the chicken do my bidding wore off, I began feeling sorry for him. Was I interrupting him from watching the preempted American Idol from last night? Was chicken in the middle of a bubble bath? And just what does chicken do between visitors?

Well guess what? It isn't all white meat after all. After a few days of playing with this thing on the Internet, I found out that the programming behind the chicken activity wasn't real time at all. Although appearing very realistic at following your directions, Subservient Chicken is actually programmed to respond to various keywords that are typed in the command line. Thus, "shake your thang" and "do the twist" could possibly yield the same chicken act.

Perhaps I was a bit disappointed in the truth, that I really didn't hold virtual power over my poultry pal. But hey, it was still a lot of fun to play with, and I won't cry foul. •

On the Web

Subservient Chicken
The site where chicken eagerly meets your instructional expectations. Hey, you'll feel special for awhile, anyway.

Snopes Lowdown on Burger King's Subservient Chicken
All the information you could ever want to know about the Subservient chicken marketing gimmick, and what it can do for you. Boy, what would we do without Snopes?