'A character that will live forever' – how we made the Levi's Flat Eric ads

When adman Sir John Hegarty approached Levi’s in the summer of 1998 with an idea that would become the second of three adverts for the brand’s Sta-Prest jeans, he left one crucial detail to the end of his pitch.

The co-founder of advertising firm BBH went through the script: two friends are in a car, reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. A traffic policeman pulls them over, searches the boot, finds a stash of unusually crease-free clothing and lets them go on their way.

Then he made his confession: “There’s just one thing I haven’t told you. One of the characters in this partnership is a yellow fluffy puppet.”

The response to the pitch went from enthusiastic to muted. Hegarty had to make the case for it on two further occasions before he finally got his way.

The ads were inspired by a music video released by the French electronic musician and film-maker Quentin Dupieux earlier that year. That video, for a track called M Seq, starred a glove puppet he had found at a flea market and fell in love with instantly. Dupieux, who also goes by the stage name Mr Oizo, had a friend make a body for the puppet and Stéphane was born.

The first concern, once the client and Dupieux were on board, was to avoid any potential copyright infringements by creating a new character for the ads.
Janet Knechtel, freelancing for the Jim Henson Creature Shop in London at the time, was tasked with “making Stéphane, but not Stéphane”.

“Quentin was very attached to him, so my job was to put a lot of ideas together and make a new character, Flat Eric,” says Knechtel. “I took Flat Eric and Stéphane to a copyright lawyer. She said: ‘If you change the shape of the nose, then I will be happy they are different.’ That’s why Flat Eric has a triangular nose.”

Just three weeks after her first meeting with BBH, Knechtel set off for Los Angeles for the three-day shoot – the newly finished puppet in her hand luggage (a spare packed safely away in the hold).

Dupieux, 24 at the time and with no experience of the world of advertising, directed the adverts. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. “It was my first time in LA and I managed to take some people from my crew – the director of photography, for example. He was a good friend who did the short film with Stéphane. It was like doing my short film again, with more money, a good fee and more excitement of course, because it was going to play on TV.”

Puppeteer Drew Massey, a Henson regular, was hired for the shoot. “There was this patio. The agency and client were there. He just walked out with Flat Eric on his hand and gave them a show,” remembers Knechtel. “It was magic because they hadn’t seen this puppet come to life.”

For Massey, Flat Eric represented a fun challenge thanks partly to the fact that he had no voice in the adverts. “Everything he did had to be physical,” he explains. “I like all the subtle movements and reactions between the lines of the other characters – and fortunately, Quentin loves all that stuff too. He’s really into the surrealism and subtlety.”

Levi’s commissioned some audience research prior to releasing the adverts, the results of which weren’t promising. It aired them anyway, in January 1999. “Once it got out there, it just exploded,” says Hegarty. “I thought it would be really good. I thought it would be daring. Nobody could have predicted the success.”

People built fan-sites dedicated to the puppet, demanded Flat Eric merchandise (you can pick up one of the dolls on eBay for around £50 today) and wrote newspaper think pieces about the puppet as the bridge between consumerism and popular culture. They also bootlegged the adverts’ soundtrack, forcing Dupieux to release it as a single – something he hadn’t thought of doing until that point.

“It was supposed to be 20 seconds for the commercial,” he recalls. “So I just did what I was doing back in the day: this rough house music thing. I did a draft in two hours the day before I went to LA to shoot the commercial.”

The single he released, Flat Beat, sold millions of copies and spent two weeks at number one in March 1999. “Of course I was happy, but it’s like when you’re at school and you don’t work, but get a good grade,” says Dupieux. “I still think Flat Beat was funny. It was a cool piece of music for the puppet, but I don’t get the success of it all. It was just a stupid loop.”

The Flat Eric ads were intended to be a one-off campaign, but Levi’s commissioned another set that aired the following summer. It’s a source of regret for Hegarty that the brand didn’t use the character again after that. He thinks Levi’s should have kept hold of the character and kept developing it. “Their loss really, but the fact the character has endured is brilliant,” he says.

Flat Eric has indeed. Dupieux retained the copyright and has released a number of short films and music videos with him over the years, including one with a cameo by Pharrell Williams in 2009 and one for Red Bull Music Academy in October 2015, which saw Massey reunited with Flat Eric for the first time since the original shoot. The musician also got a sizeable cut of the sales of Flat Eric merchandise, giving him the sort of financial independence he had never dreamed of.

“I used to hate that puppet because when I was putting out new music people were asking about it,” he says. “I’m super happy now when I look back, of course.

“When I do DJ gigs there’s always at least five people who bring the Flat Eric puppet. It’s so cute and funny; I created a character that will live forever.”

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