Watch the full ad here:

Tess's thoughts:

"Kippers tend to linger, both in the air and in the gut. That’s not great for a breakfast but it is gold dust for an ad. Lego’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning ‘Kipper’ ad from 1980 lingers on in my memory, and I’m not alone; it was voted one of the top 100 TV ads in 2000 and in 2008 Lego revived it for their 50th anniversary.

I have no idea why the ad is called ‘Kipper’ when the real hero is a Lego mouse, who escapes from a Lego cat by turning into a Lego dog, and so on through a surreal succession of transformations only to turn back into a mouse to floor a Lego elephant at the end.

The TBWA ad, made by Clearwater Films and director Ken Turner, an early example of stop-motion animation, is a classic product demo ad. In an era before sophisticated CGI the audience knew that the ingenious models had really been built. Would the audience be more cynical today?

But it doesn’t just demonstrate the physical versatility of this beloved toy; it demonstrates how Lego inspires a child’s imagination. And Mike Cozens, who wrote the script from the mouse’s POV, flips the bricks through dragons, fire engines, slippers, puddles and, of course, a kipper – a submarine-eating kipper no less - who is then defeated by an anti-kipper ballistic missile. The icing on this delicious cake is the voiceover by a Tommy Cooper impersonator, Roger Kitter, who evokes both comedy and magic.

System1's research into what makes an ad memorable shows that ‘Kipper’ ticks a lot of boxes: sound; characters; celebrity, story-telling, humour. And, in a world of global sameness, what a joy to have a script written unmistakably for a British audience."