Credit: Dangerous Minds / KFC / Public Domain

Before Ronald McDonald was haunting your nightmares or Jack in the Box blew up his boardroom, Kentucky Fried Chicken was already deep into the weird. And not just “a little offbeat” weird—we’re talking Cold War fever dream, strip-club psychosexual weird.

Long before the Colonel became a sanitised, smiling Funko Pop figure hawking chicken buckets, he was shuffling around in real life, willingly starring in TV commercials that now look like unearthed MKULTRA test footage for mid-century consumerism.

Nothing quite says savoury, fried chicken goodness like a full-blown psychological interrogation of Colonel Sanders himself. In one particularly surreal spot, the Colonel is bombarded with rapid-fire questioning while twitchy music builds like a government psy-op. Apparently, someone thought associating America’s most beloved fried food with Cold War paranoia was great branding.

And just when you think it can’t get more absurd, there’s the apocalyptic kitchen commercial, where air raid sirens blare and a glowing manhole opens right there under your linoleum floor. A disembodied finger beckons you downward, into the nuclear bunker of greasy comfort food. Because if society crumbles, at least you’ve got a two-piece and a biscuit to ride it out.

Then there’s the ad that looks like it escaped from a Benny Hill fever dream—an unashamedly saucy Lady Godiva type on horseback galloping through suburbia, where her ultimate reward is, of course, a bucket of the Colonel’s finest. It’s equal parts Carry On film and weird 1970s meat commercial. One can only assume the Venn diagram of erotica and poultry consumption was a lot closer together back then.

Things get even weirder in the now-retro-futurist stylings of a 1967 commercial where Sanders is presented not as a kindly grandpa but as a marketing cypher, a branded messiah preaching the gospel of extra crispy to the masses. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a satire dreamed up by Adult Swim. But no—it was the real deal, aired in living rooms across America without a hint of irony.

Colonel Harland Sanders himself was no actor, but that’s probably what makes these spots so fucking captivating. The sheer awkwardness of his delivery – the stiff body language, the strange cadence – only adds to their off-kilter magic. He wasn’t a performer; he was the brand, and the weirdness worked in his favour. No CGI chickens, no flashy edits. Just a man, his bucket, and an army of deranged ad execs pushing boundaries no one asked them to.

And for the record, yes, the Colonel was real. He wasn’t a military colonel, but a “Kentucky Colonel”, an honorary title handed out like biscuits at a church potluck. By his mid-60s, Sanders considered himself a failure and seriously contemplated suicide before a last-ditch hustle at a gas station turned into a fried empire. By 68, he was a millionaire. He lived to 90 and kept fronting the chain long after selling it, known behind the scenes to swear like a sailor and tell a mean dirty joke.

So next time you bite into a leg or drumstick, remember: this isn’t just dinner, it’s American dada. The ads, in all their glitchy, greasy glory, are a reminder that mass-market madness used to be a little more handmade.

Below, you can witness the madness unfold for yourself, each clip a deep-fried slice of mid-century advertising chaos. Expect unhinged dialogue, bizarre Cold War melodrama, food-porn burlesque, and Sanders himself looking like he just wandered in from a different dimension. Watch as surreal marketing logic collides with poultry and paranoia in ways that would make David Lynch reach for a wet wipe. It’s finger-lickin’ deranged.