You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

A year ago, I did an Ad Space spotlighting the commercial where the Red and Yellow M&Ms meet Santa Claus. That commercial is a Christmas season staple, one that the Mars Corporation has kept running, unchanged, for decades – it’s just that beloved of an ad.

In my analysis, I attributed the ad’s perennial success to how folks are far more tolerant of seeing the same thing over and over, year after year, if it’s framed as a Christmas tradition. However, in the comments, some of you all pointed out how the ad also succeeds because of its simplicity – as beloved commenter Agnew put it: “Way too many ads, especially Christmas ads, try to be big epic showstoppers when it’s the simple ones like this and the ringing Hershey Kisses that people remember.”

Well, what would you all say to the news that the Mars Corporation made a decades-later sequel to that commercial that very much is a big epic showstopper? A sequel with loads of slapstick and frantic action and Santa taking calls from mission control (on a modern smartphone, which, given this is supposed to happen immediately after the events of the original commercial from the 90’s, is very troubling)?

I’m not gonna say it’s a bad commercial, but the time to do a sequel like this was twenty or thirty years ago, when it could’ve just been M&Ms doing another Christmas commercial following up on the one they did a year or two prior. Doing such a lengthy and jazzed up continuation of a beloved ad that’s been imprinting in our consciousness each December for decades … well, it can’t help feeling a mite sacrilegious.

Not A Christmas Story 2 level sacrilegious, but still.