Spuds MacKenzie ("The Original Party Animal"[1]) is a fictional bull terrier dog character used for an extensive advertising campaign marketing Bud Light beer in the late 1980s. The Spuds MacKenzie mascot and campaign was the idea of a 23-year-old art director, Jon Moore. At the time, he was working at Needham, Harper, and Steers, a Chicago advertising agency. The dog first showed up in a Bud Light Super Bowl XXI ad in 1987.[2]
The dog was portrayed by a female bull terrier named Honey Tree Evil Eye,[3] or Evie for short. Evie was from Woodstock, Illinois, and lived in North Riverside, Illinois, with her owner's family, where she died in 1993.[4] Anheuser-Busch sponsored many dogs from the kennel in Illinois where Evie was born.[5]
The Spuds McKenzie ad campaign was not without its share of controversy. Shortly after Spuds' rise to fame, it was learned that the dog, portrayed as male in the ads, was actually female.[5] Politicians and advocacy groups criticized the ads for promoting consumption of alcohol by children. Soon after the ads first aired in 1987, Senator Strom Thurmond began his own media campaign, claiming that the beer maker was using Spuds to appeal to children in order to get them interested in their product at an early age.[6] By Christmas 1987, more legal action resulted from Bud Light's use of ads featuring Spuds dressed as Santa.[7] Advertisements for alcohol beverages cannot reference Santa Claus in states such as Ohio.[8]
In 2017, the character appeared in Bud Light's Super Bowl LI advertisement as a ghost who helps a man named Brian reunite with his friends; the ad was an homage to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The house number in this advertisement's last segment is 1989, the year Spuds was retired.[9]
