A CLASSIC.
Back during the Super Bowl in 2014, Dale Earnhardt Jr. starred in a commercial called the “Dale Call,” which was for Mountain Dew and featured Jr. driving up on some duck hunters after one of them uses their “Dale call.”
It was a duck call constructed to look like the engine of Dale Jr.’s Mountain Dew race car, and the ad became a big hit, so much so that Mountain Dew started making actual Dale calls. The ad took off, and of course, Mountain Dew eventually had to make “Dale Calls” to sell because so many people wanted them… but the actual filming of the commercial itself didn’t exactly go as planned.
On his Dale Jr. Download podcast this week, Jr. recalled coming down the flu the day they were supposed to film, and he was incredibly ill, and felt like he couldn’t even make it to set. He called Jake, who worked at Hendrick Motorsports and was working on the deal, and told him he couldn’t make it.
Jake insisted he had to come because there was so much money on the line, and seeing as this was being used for the Super Bowl, was a huge deal. They scrapped a lot of what they wanted to do that day so Jr. could be there for as little time as possible, though I’m sure doing those donuts in the car was NOT fun being that sick:
“Let me tell y’all something… I had the flu that day we filmed that. S***. I don’t remember exactly what time of year this was, but I’m telling you, like, I was bad sick. And I called called Jake Backer, who was working the Mountain Dew/Pepsi deal for Hendrick at the time. And I call him, and I’m supposed to go to downtown Charlotte, into a studio, and get in this car and have it spun around in circles, as we’re doing in the donuts.
And there’s a lot of other stuff too that they wanted me to film for that commercial. I’m pumped to do it, because it’s a great commercial. I think that thing aired the Super Bowl. So, I mean, it’s like, gotta do it. This is really important. There’s lots of money that’s been spent for this production, and they’re all down there in Charlotte waiting on me to get up that morning and go down there.
Well, I wake up, and I call him, I’m like, ‘Jake I am sick. I can’t come. I am bad sick.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh man, give me five minutes.’ He calls me back, he’s like, ‘Dude, we gotta do this. We can’t not shoot this today. You’ve gotta figure this out. Can you come down here? We have whittled it down to literally nothing. You’ll be here in 30 minutes.’ And I’m like, ‘alright.'”
Of course, he was “miserable,” but they got it done, and it was a huge hit:
“And I mean it was I was miserable, but I drove down there, walk in, I climb in this car, get my suit, get make up, and all that stuff. Climb in, sit in this car, they spun me around. I did whatever they asked me to do, and drinking the Mountain Dew and all that stuff.
And they had me out of there less than an hour. And I was so sick. But I was so thankful, it still turned out fine. I didn’t do everything they had in the the skit, you know, but we got it done and it ended up being fun.”
Doing donuts like that in a car while you have the flu sounds like a true nightmare… I don’t know how he powered through.
Jr. says they hadn’t planned to actually make the Dale calls, but because the commercial was so popular and everyone was wanting one, they ended up selling them and Jr. still has his too:
“I didn’t know that we were actually ever gonna make those. We weren’t planning on making the Dale Call toy, we weren’t. But it was an opportunity… like, well damn, I kind of wanted one. Who wouldn’t want one? So they made them.
They came up with a company and a way to make that thing. They weren’t even thinking to make it. But it’s fun how stuff like that does so well, and you’re like, well s***, now we’ll make it. I’m still signing some of those things here and there.”
Honestly, it was a great, funny commercial, and I still think it’s one of the best NASCAR commercials that’s been done in the modern era of the sport. But I truly never would’ve guessed he had the flu while they filmed this…
If you’ve never seen the commercial, you’re missing out. They just don’t make Super Bowl commercials like this anymore:
Here’s more from the Ask Jr. segment of the podcast this week:
