TVSquad

Remember that alleged "subliminal ad" for McDonald's that popped up during an episode of Iron Chef America on the Food Network? You know, the one that some people were convinced was secretly inserted into the show to make people crave syrupy sodas and lukewarm hamburgers?

It was a glitch. Of course, myself and some thoughtful TV Squad readers knew it all along. I haven't read every blog entry about the incident, but mine was the only one I know of that didn't automatically assume McDonald's was trying some underhanded tactic to make people buy its food. The boring truth is that not everything is a conspiracy; sometimes there's a logical and simple explanation for things.

Besides, all of this attention paid to a minor glitch in the middle of a television program takes away focus from the fact that the president is breeding alien clones beneath the Pentagon and putting truth serum in our toothpaste. Let's focus on the real issues, people.

A YouTube video featuring a "single frame" shot from a McDonald's ad in the middle of Food Network's Iron Chef has some convinced that the company is sneaking subliminal messages into the network's programming.

First of all, I think the offending image is more than one frame. It goes by quickly, but even at normal speed you can at least glimpse that something is there. Second, the practice of inserting one-frame ads goes back to the '50s when it was thought that such a gimmick would actually plant subliminal messages in people's brains. This was proved false almost as quickly when studies confirmed that the frames simply weren't long enough for anyone to truly register them.