…Just a little late. But I didn’t know this commercial existed until this morning: Peter caught it last night while doing some late-night viewing.
I was whinging about commercials that I hate, the other day. For fairness’s sake, here are a few that made me smile recently.
First: some pretty backgrounds in here, regardless of the numerous scientific impossibilities. Wondering whether they did that gibbous Earth with Terragen. Other questions: who moved the Moon so close to the Earth, how come the temperature in vacuum on the Moon is now high enough to keep beer liquid, etc etc. Oh, never mind. The CGI is fun.
In the Bright Splashy Colors department: this one from Jacob’s, a major biscuit / cookie maker in Ireland.
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…And finally this one, one of a sequence of increasingly peculiar little ads from a major UK bank.
…Well, not really finally. Here’s one thing more: not a commercial, but it made me laugh until I wept. Secondary to the subject matter dealt with in the wonderful Cheap Flights song from Fascinating Aida, here comes that “Hitler: The Rise of Evil” footage again; and this time the Führer is upset about being booked on a certain annoying airline… Beware: this is not worksafe, due to much dropping of the F-bomb.
Sometimes when I’m working, the TV is running in the background to provide innocuous “white noise”. Not real white noise, mind you… just a something-going-on mutter that helps me think. Naturally, somewhere along the line, this will involve commercials as well as content.
There are a few of these lately that seem to be turning up a lot, and they’re really getting on my wick, to the point where I’ll change channels to avoid them. These (at the moment) primarily being:
THE CUSHELLE KOALA
This creature is part of the toilet paper company’s project to rebrand Charmin (who else remembers Mr. Whipple?) as Cushelle. Frankly, I preferred Mr. Whipple. (Bizarre as he was.)
The whole romancing-the-roll thing strikes me as faintly peculiar. It’s toilet paper. Get a life, Koala.
…And then there’s the Birds Eye frozen food commercial series of the last couple years, featuring an exceptionally creepy Muppet-style polar bear. It lives in people’s freezers and lectures them in a sinister tone on their cooking talents, the content of their fish sticks (“fish fingers”, to the UK/Irish audience) and other such topics. Lately it’s even escaped from the freezer and has started manifesting itself to people on vacation (at the next table in the restaurant), etc. Bad enough that the rude creature disses your cooking, but it has to stalk you too? Sheesh.
One of these is worse than the rest. An unfortunate woman with a fish on a plate opens the freezer and finds the Bear eyeing her with obvious disdain for her ability in the kitchen. “Cooking fish?” A pregnant pause. “Tricky.” And then goes on to sell her bake-it-in-a-bag fish.
Oh, really? Scale-it-rinse-it-pat-it-dry-oil-it-salt-and-pepper-it, run-it-under-the-grill-for-seven-to-ten-minutes tricky? THAT tricky? Gaaaaaah. Here comes a whole generation of cooks put off cooking by the Bear That Lives In The Freezer.
(Please note: I do occasionally use this product. But I started using it before I saw the damn bear. If I’d had no previous experience of it, I ‘d by now have made a conscious decision never to go near it because of the Bear commercials.)
Enough ranting. Here’s one of a series that has been making me laugh: the commercials for the online insurer MoreThan, featuring “MoreThan Freeman”.
The ScoobyThon on Cartoon Network continues, much to Peter’s helpless dismay. I left a videotape recording on super-slow last night and actually managed to catch my very first piece of TV work, a deathless thing which revels in the title “The Hairy Scare of the Devil-Bear.” It features two characters named after Larry and Fuzzy Niven, this being its only possibly claim to any kind of fame whatsoever.
I wish they would just “strip” the things in temporal order so that I could get all my taping done at once, but there’s no way they’re going to do that: even middle-of-the-night viewers would be bored witless. Oh well. It’s been educational watching excerpts from The Many Lives of Scooby and noting highs (Shaggy unpacks a suitcase and mutters, “I guess I’d better dress for dinner.” — at which point we see the suitcase is full of identical green floppy T-shirts…) and lows (right now the group is having a run in with, not just a ghost, but a ghost spaceman. Argh).
The only thing about this exercise that’s really beginning to get under my skin would be the incessant (five per hour, at least) commercials for a relentlessly insipid MOR collection of Christian music called “Songs 4 Worship”. “Millions have Experienced the Glory!” the announcer intones. Well, if they have, it’s been despite the music, not because of it. I’m going to have to listen to the B Minor Mass about thirty times to get the sound of some of these things out of my head. The heck with you, Time Life Warner AOL Whatever! (Yeah, I know, I work for Warner sometimes. Sometimes the King’s Shilling looks more tarnished than others.) (But I’ll take the heck-wish back the minute that the story editor on Justice League calls me and asks me to write a Green Lantern script. Yeah, that’s the ticket.)
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