Unreleased Super Bowl Tampon Commercial (existence unconfirmed; cancelled Super Bowl commercial; 2002)

This article has been tagged as NSFL due to its gross imagery of menstruation.

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A bunch of tampons

Status: Unknown

On November 19, 2024, X user Rambo Van Halen tweeted about an unreleased commercial for tampons that was in production circa 2002.

Rambo Van Halen wrote: Hi. I've made a lot of commercials over the years, and this one is horrible. But sadly it's not the first time this has happened.

Story:

[Disclamer: I wasn’t here for this one but I heard the story after the fact. I heard it from two people who claimed to be there. The stories were fairly similar so I’m inclined to believe this actually happened.]

Back around 2002ish—when TV commercials had giant budgets and brands were willing to fund what amounted to high concept art films—a major tampon manufacturer set out to make a Super Bowl commercial. The concept was a Busby Berkeley style musical song and dance tribute to The Period.

It was to be a Celebration of Menstruation.

If you’re not familiar with the Busby Berkeley musicals, these are the ones from the 1930s where a long line of showgirls are doing elaborately choreographed dancing in elaborate costumes on elaborate sets.

(Check out the dance scenes from Gold Diggers of 1933 on Youtube.)

These particular showgirls were dressed as giant tampons, and as they descended the steps a fountain of red liquid soaked their costumes. There was also a synchronized swimming scene with dozens of swimmers in floating tampon costumes swimming in a pool of red water.

No really. That was the concept.

They probably spent millions on this. The costumes had to be at least $20-30k each and they needed hundreds, because the costumes were ruined every time they got sprayed with the red liquid. According to my back of the envelope math, the dancers, choreographers, stages, sets, lighting, cranes, water tanks, crew, multiple cameras, and film stock probably got into 8 figures.

…

On day 3 or 4 of the shoot someone from the Big Tampon c-suite came to their senses and shut the thing down. In one telling of the story the tampon execs didn’t know it was happening and when they found out a bunch of people lost their jobs (or so I heard).

Thankfully it never was completed and it never aired. But I’m willing to bet the film neg is still in some random vault waiting to be unearthed by a future archivist.

To date, no other evidence of this commercial exists, and no one involved in the production of this unreleased commercial has come forward with more information.