Did Everybody Else Know That the Budweiser 'Whassup?!' Ad Was Based On a Real Short Film?!

By Petr Navovy | Social Media | March 9, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Social Media | March 9, 2023 |

Everybody here remembers ‘Whassup?!’/’Wazzup?!’, right? Budweiser’s advertising campaign that ran from late 1999 to 2002, which featured a group of friends calling each other up, not to chat, but to play around with an inside joke: A heavily contracted and skewed version of the phrase ‘What’s up?’

For reference, and for nostalgia’s sake, here it is (in lovely, vintage, potato quality):

It’s hard to describe to those who weren’t there at the time how omnipresent this ad was. Before the maturation of the internet, our attention didn’t have a billion items on social media feeds and a million different entertainment channels to decide between. What was on the telly—that’s what people knew about.

And people knew about ‘Whassup?!’

I remember seeing and hearing it everywhere back then. Checking out the instances of the phrase, reverberations are occasionally still felt to this day, but back then it appeared in songs, TV shows, cinema, wrestling. People would just be saying it in day-to-day life. It was massive in my school. The teachers must’ve been pulling their hair out.

What I didn’t know until yesterday was that ‘Whassup?!’ didn’t spring fully formed from the mind of a coked-up 90s advertising exec, but that it was actually based on a short film. An actual, heartfelt piece about a particular brand of cishet male friendship that’s informed by a desire for connection and companionship but which constantly needs to find ways to innovate to get around the blocks enforced by a toxic patriarchy that instills in us a fear of communicating directly. Writer-director Chuck Stone III (Drumline) wanted to pay homage to an inside joke that had developed in his friend group, so he made True, and cast his actual friends in it:

It’s funny how context can change everything. Now that the animating principle has changed and the desire to sell me something has been removed from it, I find the bit quite touching and, well, true!