Breaking Bad's Nostalgia Boom! Underwear Brand Blows Up Walter White's Briefs

AGENCY: Let’s buy Walter White’s iconic underpants from Breaking Bad. For $32,500. We’ll blow them up in the desert. Let’s blow up a car, too.

CLIENT: Great idea!

Nearly a decade after airing its last episode, Breaking Bad continues to enjoy a pop-culture revival in 2023. First, we savored Popcorners’ loving Super Bowl spoof with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul recreating their iconic roles of Walt and Jesse.

Today, an incendiary tribute emerges from underwear brand SAXX and agency Quality Meats. They acquired the mighty-whities in an auction, stuffed them with tannerite, headed out to the middle of nowhere … and had a blast:

A Pontiac Aztek (Walt’s model, but not actually from the show) also met its fiery fate at Adrenaline Mountain in the Nevada dessert. The video lampoons two famously explosive Breaking Bad plots. In the end, we learn that all proceeds from April sales of SAXX’s white briefs or boxers will benefit the Testicular Cancer Foundation.

OK, what exactly was the brief for this ballsy stunt?

“The goal was to make a statement for what SAXX stands for and believes,” Gordy Sang, co-chief creative officer at Quality Meats, tells Muse. “And they believe that no pair of underwear without a pouch that gently cradles your man-pieces [SAXX’s big selling point] should be near any man’s pieces. So, taking the most infamous pair of those gross [pouch-free] undies and eliminating them from the planet seemed like a nice way to make that statement.”

He continues: “SAXX came to us mentioning the [Walter White] underwear was on auction, and they were going to bid on them. Initially they wanted to do something small, only lob $5,000 at it. But the bidding went higher and higher, so they went for it. They weren’t entirely sure what they wanted to do with the underwear once they got them. They just knew they needed to be the owners. Within five minutes of finding out we said, ‘You need to blow them up.’ And they lit up. They knew that was the only answer.”

Clearly, nothing else would do.

“There was some fear of offending the Breaking Bad fans,” Sang recalls, “which is where the idea of saving some burnt scraps for a select number of people came to life. And that put SAXX at ease to blow them off the face of the planet.”

So, 25 purchasers will receive commemorative charred shreds from the infamous undies. (List them on eBay. Who knows, maybe some kooky brand will pay you $32K.)

Past fun stuff from the SAXX-Meats team includes this tutorial on “How a Gentleman Treats His Balls,” and a playful March Madness 2022 online “registry” for dudes with sore testicles.