Seth Green is co-starring in that weird indie-Christian Elvis movie that’s coming out tomorrow that Vince from FilmDrunk is so excited about. Green discussed the movie at some length in an interview that the Metro published yesterday, but more importantly (to me, anyway), he discussed what it was like being a “catchphrase kid.” See, back in the early ’90s, Seth Green starred in a regional commercial for “Rally’s” fast food chain — which according to Wikipedia, originated in the midwest — where he repeatedly said the catchphrase “Cha-Ching!”
So, despite the fact that Seth Green was a seasoned actor at that point, the commercial skyrocked him to basically “Bart in the ‘I Didn’t Do It’ Boy episode of The Simpsons.” Here he is on what it was like to have people yelling “Cha-Ching” at him everywhere he went:
It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever experienced. You have to understand, I had already been acting for 13, 14 years before I got that job. I’ve done hundreds of commercials. This was no different. The fact that it became a popular catchphrase was so surreal. What I noticed was the way our culture defined “celebrity.” There was this sensation created around this catchphrase that had nothing to do with me as a person or as a performer. People didn’t even know my name. People weren’t like, “Oh, it’s Seth Green saying ‘Cha-Ching.’” They said, “Oh my gosh, it’s the ‘Cha-Ching’ guy.” So I got to do really weird things in the disguise of the “Cha-Ching” guy, because nobody knew it was me.
This woman in New Orleans flew me to cheer the halftime at a Saints-Raiders game. I stepped off the plane like Luke Perry in the second year of “90210.” People were losing their minds. It’s like we were speaking a language and the language was “Cha-Ching.” I was 17 so I was still getting into a fair amount of trouble. I was still getting thrown over the hood of cars by police on occasion. [Laughs] Now I had two to six armed New Orleans police officers escorting me everywhere. They were giving me their cards and saying, “My wife wants to cook the ‘Cha-Ching’ guy a home-cooked meal.”
Since I grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania, I never saw the commercials as a kid, because I definitely would have remembered this. While we’re making Simpsons comparisons, Seth Green’s character of the Rally’s fast food employee is like if the Pimple-Faced Teen and Poochie had a gay, bestialitous, statutory rape love child.
