El Toro de Osborne: advertising, community, and myth

Abstract

Black bull cutouts, silhouettes of El Toro, dotted hilltops from the plains of La Mancha to the seacoast of Spain's Costa del Sol. Then the European Union decreed that alcohol could no longer be advertised on billboards. The Osborne brandy company removed its bull-boards, but public outcry brought them back, sans the company name—the Osborne bull had become a national icon. This is a semiotic case study of the mythic system appropriated by the Osborne advertisement and the second-order semiological system that the iconic billboards created.

Acknowledgments

We presented an earlier version of this paper, “Spanish Icon: El Toro de Osborne,” at the International Popular Culture Conference, Downing College, Cambridge, England, on August 6, 2001.