Shaquille O'Neal has responded to John Oliver's joke comparing the athlete's Frosted Flakes commercial to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thereby expanding the Kellogg's Cinematic Universe to include Oliver himself. Oliver hosts the late-night show Last Week Tonight on HBO, which has earned multiple Emmy awards for its writing over the course of its seven-year, eight-season run. During the pandemic, the comedian has filmed the show from home rather than in front of a live studio audience. The talk show is best known for Oliver's monologues, which typically take the form of comically agitated rants about the absurdities of politics, society, and in this case, cereal.
Like most late-night hosts, Oliver peppers news coverage with one-liners accompanied by images, but the comedian is partial to exploring subjects in-depth with longer segments. Oliver dedicated a significant part of a recent web segment on the subject of cereal to a Frosted Flakes commercial starring Shaq. The approximately 30-second ad shows Shaq and Tony the Tiger video chatting while eating breakfast as if they're close friends. With little exposition, the commercial fleshes out a fantasy world in which Tony, a fictional character, and Shaq, a real person, both exist. Oliver expresses admiration for the ad's seemingly unintentional narrative complexity and points out that the "perfect cereal commercial" establishes a "more richly detailed cinematic universe" than the massive MCU. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is currently in Phase 4 of its development after releasing over a decade's worth of interconnected superhero film series and television shows.
Shaq has now responded to Oliver on Twitter, thus creating a rift in the Kellogg's Cinematic Universe space-time continuum with unknowable consequences. Yesterday, O'Neal quoted a tweet from Last Week Tonight that includes a link to Oliver's web segment referencing the basketball player. In his response, Shaq jokingly invites Oliver to breakfast with himself and Tony the Tiger, perhaps without realizing that such an invitation throws the universe of the ad into a state of utter chaos. Below is Shaq's fateful invitation:
To begin with, O'Neal's response implies that he has now seen Oliver's segment, or at least has been made aware. This fact alone betrays the laws of the KCU, in which Tony the Tiger roams free among men and is best friends with professional basketball star Shaquille O'Neal. Shaq has now created a meta-narrative where an alternate-universe Shaq not only exists but can also watch his alternate self existing in KCU Prime. Meanwhile, we have John Oliver, who dwells so far outside the Kellogg's Cinematic Universe that he has created a video of himself gazing into that universe while explaining its laws. Now, in a twist so complex that neither Christopher Nolan nor M. Night Shyamalan would be able to dream it up, Shaq 2.0 has invited John Oliver to breakfast with himself and Tony, who exists in KCU Prime, with a different version of Shaq.
Shaq's seemingly innocuous tweet generates an infinite number of world-altering questions that demand answers. Is there an alternate version of John Oliver somewhere in the universe of the Frosted Flakes commercial? Does Oliver Prime also have a late-night talk show on which he dissects an ad that unites Shaq and Tony the Tiger? Does the Shaq from that universe also watch a clip in which another version of himself exists, and does he extend an invitation to Oliver to have breakfast in an alternate universe containing either or both himself and a second Shaq? Of course, the ad is just that, and both Oliver and O'Neal are only joking. But Oliver may be correct in his assertion that the universe of a 30-second cereal ad is, in fact, more complex than that of the sprawling MCU—perhaps more complicated than even he realized.
Source: SHAQ/Twitter