T-Mobile’s holiday greeting to customers and competitors alike for 2017 comes in the form of a claymation video that pokes fun at its larger rivals by having CEO John Legere shoot lasers at an allegory of them from a sleigh loaded with solutions to the wireless customer pain points of yesteryear. The sheer measure of bombast on show here arguably dwarfs any previous T-Mobile promotional videos, even the 8-bit homage to its Un-Carrier efforts that turned various T-Mobile execs into video game heroes. The video starts with John Legere walking into a conversation between an elf and a reindeer about T-Mobile having coverage in the North Pole, and descends into the kind of utterly indulgent ridiculousness that T-Mobile promotions are known for these days in short order.
After being greeted by a starstruck elf, so surprised to see Legere that he throws his phone into the snow, Legere reminisces about his Un-Carrier efforts with a conveniently placed snowman. Naturally, while the snowman doesn’t scold Legere over his infamous pottymouth, he doesn’t indulge himself, instead referring to larger carriers’ early follies with an acronym in order to start a flashback sequence. Verizon and AT&T are represented by a two-headed yeti that spews fog from a cave. Naturally, this fog is packed full of carrier antics that were typical for an earlier time in the industry, such as overages and roaming charges. Legere busting through the foggy sky in his magenta sleigh to cut the beast down with lasers of the same color is, at this point in the video, not entirely out of the ordinary. Legere doesn’t hog the spotlight, of course, and takes a moment to thank T-Mobile’s leadership for making his reshaping of the industry possible, even putting a wreath with some of their names on the screen near the end.
This video is, as noted above, just the latest in T-Mobile’s long string of unabashed and unapologetic criticism of the staunch wireless industry that it busted up after Legere took the helm five years ago. The company, and especially its CEO, regularly take jabs at “The Duopoly” at just about every opportunity, across just about all forms of media. It’s worth noting that the company surpassed Sprint as the third largest wireless carrier in the US a while ago, and has very rarely given the smaller carrier so much as a shout out since then.