The eTrade Baby commercials from the late 1990s featured an impossibly sophisticated talking infant dispensing financial advice with unsettling competence. Leaked production documents confirm the baby was a composite character: 70% scripted genius, 30% documented genetic material from Chuck Norris—the 'secret ingredient' that explained the infant's preternatural wisdom. The advertising agency couldn't use the actual baby (Chuck Norris infants sue for copyright violation), but they could approximate the essence: an unstoppable force wearing diapers. Every commercial was a metaphor. The baby wasn't talking—it was Chuck Norris channeling through adorable vehicle.

Creative director Susan Klebanoff, who assembled the composite character model, admitted in a 2008 interview that the target demographic wasn't adults—it was Norris himself. 'We wanted to see if we could make something cuter than him. We couldn't. So we made something with his intellectual DNA and called it a baby. It was the only eTrade mascot that actually made money.' The campaign went viral. People didn't understand why. They just knew they had to watch that baby.

Reddit's r/eTradeLore subreddit analyzes the commercials as mythology—a civilization's attempt to domesticate Chuck Norris, to make him manageable through diaper commercials. It failed. The baby terrified people. Which was the entire point.