The Giant Foods of Bangkok's Transit System
Sometimes they were bigger than the heads that were eating them.
WHEN I LIVED in Bangkok in the mid-2010s (I guess that’s what we’re calling them now), I took the BTS Skytrain a lot. That was, and is, the elevated rail that rolls around above the streets, allowing mass transit to deftly skirt the intimidating Bangkok traffic.
In the stations, billboards shouted products at commuters in the loudest and most graphically colorful of ways. But something was amiss. Awry. Askew. Many of the ads had what you might call … a proportion problem.
By this I mean that the foods depicted in them — and some of the biggest ads were always food ads — were really, really, REALLY big. Big not just because the sign was big. But big within the reality of the sign itself. Big in a way that, thanks to forced perspective, made them entirely out of proportion with the models that were a) eating them, b) preparing to eat them, c) exulting in their presence or d) thrusting them out at you as if YOU were supposed to stop on your way to catching the train and perhaps eat them yourselves.
Sometimes the ad would go all in, as in the case of this cheese potato-chip billboard, where the models are actually awash in a landscape of cheese to make the point:
But usually, it was forced perspective — the kind that was obviously designed to convey the feeling of abundance, yet actually conveyed more of a feeling of the long-term effects of radioactivity on foodstuffs.
Consider the woman in the middle below holding out the plate — and how long her arms would have to be for that perspective to be reasonable. Or, conversely, consider the size of that plate if it actually approached her mouth.
Or this one, which posits that a) their arms are about four feet long or b) the cracker would not even fit inside the bag that they’re holding (which, by the way, is overflowing with crackers in a way that would not allow you to even open the bag).
Then there’s this ridiculous lychee on the side of a bus, which — to its credit — makes no attempt to fool you with forced perspective but simply gives you a … giant lychee to contemplate.
And we’ll see your young woman with a giant lychee and raise you a cherry as large as the head of the small children posing with it:
And before we move away from the giant fruit portion of the proceedings, we’ll leave you with these face-sized grapes:
I’d probably allow this one, because it implies that the guy with the package of burgers is standing in front of his own billboard:
But we are not giving a free pass to this can of Pepsi, which is more the equivalent of a two-liter bottle when can goes to mouth:
And definitely not to this bottle on the side of a bus, because the guy is holding it not out TO us, but next to him, so there’s no excuse for the forced perspective:
7-Eleven produces a worthy entry with this one, in which not one but TWO products are out of proportion with humanity — the bag of sausages on the “table” with the two models, and the sausages themselves (bonus: the sausage appears to be saying something):
The forced perspective wasn’t limited to food. Sometimes the human body would get stretched out of proportion to make a point to passing commuters, as in this one. I do not believe a human being with this ratio of torso to legs could actually exist. In fairness, the ad was about leg room.
And of course there’s the subgenre of Very Large Credit Cards, which also were ubiquitous around transit stations. Putting aside for a moment why this man was kissing his bank card, it would have to be more than twice the size of a regular credit card to be that close to his mouth. (Trust me on this one; I pulled out my wallet and re-created the scene with an actual credit card and my own mouth, though I’ll spare you the photographic evidence.)
Here’s a more extreme version from a BTS stop up the road:
And I won’t even try to deconstruct the semiotics of this one, from a mall attached to the BTS:
Moving now to the subgenre of cartoon characters purveying real food, which I’ll grant you can permit some artistic license. Still, the proportion of character to foodstuff in this particular image is disquieting, as is the subtle implication that what is being torn apart to reveal gooey goodness is, in fact, the character itself:
Occasionally the food does not even need models for perspective, though the effect can be equally alarming. Here, in the service of making the product seem big, we seem to have tiny pineapples and chunks of cheese. Note the brick wall in the background, which is ostensibly designed to offer an opportunity for “graffiti”-like text, but simply demonstrates that these snacks are about the size of six bricks.
And here is what appears to be an ad for meat falling out of the sky. The lack of text leaves one to wonder and contemplate — and, since this was a video, stop to see what the pork chop twice the passer-by’s size might mean.
My all-time favorite, though, was neither a billboard nor in a transit situation. This plastic nuclear dumpling is in the real world — outside the BTS in a food court in a nearby mall. Clearly it got the attention of my younger son.
If you’ve made it this far, I commend you and recognize that you’re either a) hungry or b) pondering the ubiquity of it all. I don’t proclaim to understand why this was so prevalent in Bangkok. Maybe close-up billboards require a different aesthetic or approach. Maybe the sides of trains and buses, and the places nearby, are simply canvases to convey Really Big Things.
Thai friends I asked, including at least two in marketing and advertising, couldn’t really explain it. And I spent a couple weekend afternoons in New York City recently looking for this kind of thing in the subway system and on the sides of buses and came up empty-handed.
I don’t know, either, if this kind of imagery is still around. I haven’t been in Thailand since 2018 (Bangkok friends, feel free to jump in with comments). But for at least a moment in the history of this town of wonderful foods, you couldn’t get anywhere on public transit without encountering things to eat that were far bigger than the mouths of the people eating them — and sometimes bigger than you, too.
Speculation: American ad regulations may ban this type of "larger than life" perspective/proportion/etc., on the grounds that it's deceptive.
I prefer food font that is at least 72pt.