For-The-Birds Commercials For iluvbirds W/O
Mar 07 '05
The Bottom Line Some commercials are strictly for the birds!!!
It's now the evening of Monday, March 7, 2005.
I'm not going to be on much longer.
Unless there's another fly-in-the-ointment, I'll be returning in a few days with cable-modem instead of dial-up! I can hardly wait!!!
The commercials that have been some of the non-food ones to have me drooling are the ones from our local cable company (Insight Communications) where they talk about how wonderful cable-modem is.
I've been looking forward to having it since forever, and I've come so close!
Long story! Will tell it to you someday soon!
Anyway, before I turn this machine over to Mark to work his magic on it, I wanted to be sure to leave you with the following...
Sometime back, I received an invitation from iluvbirds to join her W/O about TV commercials that can really tick a person off.
I haven't found that many that actually make me fighting mad--just some that (like the first one) are created out of ignorance, some that are somewhat annoying, and some that are just kinda dumb.
What I've come up with are eight TV commercials (and/or commercial "types"), three radio commercials, and an Internet commercial/commercial type.
Hope you find my interpretations of them more enjoyable than annoying...
DO Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful!
I remember this ad from my early childhood, and, to this day, I think that it's so beautiful.
The music is absolutely amazing, transporting me to a place where I'm wrapped up in the adventure and beauty of The Old West!
And that gorgeous, healthy-looking cowboy riding that horse that has the look of a prizewinner!
I heard that this cowboy volunteered to put himself into a documentary years later--only, this time, he wasn't the picture-of-health riding his prizewinning horse out in the Western twilight.
Instead, he was a cancer patient wasting away--because, at one time, he believed the message in his own ad. But no more.
To this day, I still think that this classic commercial that featured The Marlboro Man has to be among the most beautiful commercials ever made, and I'll be the first one to admit that I love that instrumental background music.
He and his horse both look like the tops in Hollywood when they pause--surrounded by the last glow of sunset--and the man lights a cigarette and begins to smoke it.
However, a commercial advertising cancer sticks just shouldn't be that beautiful.
Screeching Green Lady
I believe this commercial started airing in 1972 shortly after I'd finished my freshman year of college. Of course, it might have been going on for even longer than that but, being in college, I hadn't had the chance to catch it until that summer.
How can I describe the music?...The best I can come up with is elevator music on steroids!
This played in the background while this bottle-blonde, middle-aged lady who seemed to have a strange, greenish cast to her entire body began this screechy speech about how (name of Indianapolis-based supermarket deleted) could sell anything in the store for less than any other supermarket in the area.
"If you find anything cheaper at another store, you tell us about it, and we will sell it to you EVEN cheaper!"
What do you get when you play a 45 rpm of Porky Pig at 78 rpm and mix that with fingernails scraping a blackboard; chalk squeaking on a blackboard; and Rosie Perez playing nagging, greedy, restless Muriel in the movie It Could Happen To You, and you might have some idea what this yapping lady who made an appearance no fewer than one or two times per night sounded like.
And keep in mind that she was also green!!!
Man/Woman Off The Street, Eh? Wanna Sell Me Some Prime Swampland!?!
Here comes this man up to this woman to ask her to take a sip of two glasses of iced-tea.
First glass, she says, "So?"
Next glass, she simply gushes over how wonderful it tastes.
Here comes another man up to another woman to ask her to taste peanut butter from a couple of unmarked jars.
First jar, she says, "So?"
Next jar, she simply gushes over how wonderful it tastes.
Of course, in both cases, the person picks the product being plugged. DUH?
These are supposed to be unrehearsed taste tests with non-actors just found by interviewers while they were roaming around.
I think the commercials were aimed at consumers who believe that the earth is actually flat!
If You Must Have A Tastebud Orgasm, At Least Do It Tastefully!
To me, Dom deLuise is someone who can put his tastebuds between my sheets anytime he wants to!
When he talks about food, he definitely sounds as if he's orgasmic-to-the-max--but he does it in good taste.
But I can remember this Diet Pepsi commercial from the late 1960s or early 1970s where I just wanted it to be over the minute it came on.
I think it showed the person (female) drinking it while wearing this exaggerated come-hither look on her face and a bathing suit that could barely cover a teacup chihuahua.
And it had this little ditty going on that went something like, "Now you see it..now you don't...now you have it...now you won't...Diet Pepsi...just one calorie...now you see it...now you don't. That great Pepsi taste. Diet Pepsi won't go to your waist. Diet Pepsi...just one calorie...now you see it...now you don't."
This ditty was sung in a really fakey-sounding seductive way.
I think it was about the smuttiest thing on TV at the time--as TV didn't have a "cutting edge" anything like it does today.
Think this was bad?
It got worse.
The next commercial they came up with showed her either swimming, squirming around, or both in it.
This time, the ditty went: "Oooooooooooooh...Ahhhhhhhhh...Oooooooooooooh...Ahhhhhhhhh...Diet Pepsi just one calorie...Now you see it...now you don't."
If this commercial had been broadcast over my telephone instead of over my TV, I could have had the call traced and had the pervert arrested!
One more thing...they currently have one of those ridiculous "Oooooooooooooh...Ahhhhhhhhh...Oooooooooooooh...Ahhhhhhhhh... commercials out for breath mints which is at least as bad, if not worse. But, at least, the people are dressed modestly. Or is the commercial for insoles for your shoes? I can't remember what it's even a commercial for--which just proves that it's probably totally-useless when it comes to promoting its product.
One Word: LOUD!!!
Back in 1982, a very special friend of mine (an "adopted" older brother) needed a place to stay while he was looking for work in the area.
I hadn't completely moved into my current home at the time, so I let him stay there.
Later, he would live at my folks' place and I moved into my place.
At that time, Uncle Finley and Aunt Marce had recently retired and spent part of each year living in the north part of my house.
So, they were in the north half, and Ken was in the south half.
He told me about watching this movie one night and how the sound kept getting lower and lower so that he had to keep getting up to turn up the sound (no remote on this TV).
Then, lo and behold, the first commercial of the movie came roaring on!
Ken about jumped out of his skin and rushed over to the TV as quickly as possible to turn it down--not only for the comfort of his own ears but, also, he was afraid that it was so loud that Uncle Finley and Aunt Marce could hear it in their bedroom, which was at the northmost point of my house!
Nobody can tell us that there's no such thing as a commercial being louder than the regular programming, because we know that the opposite is true!
I've even had the TV turned down to a level of background noise and still had some commercial to blare out at me. Imagine if I'd had the volume up to listening-level at the time--or even loud.
It's hard to imagine what the noise would be like from such a commercial if someone were already watching TV at a loud level (or had the volume cranked up while gone elsewhere in a feeble attempt to make burglars think that there was someone at home).
I've heard of houses mysteriously exploding.
Usually, this is blamed on some kind of gas leak getting overheated.
Could it be that this was a home where the TV had already been set to a loud volume only to have one of those noise-polluting commercials to come on!?!
While Children In The Third World Are Starving...
This guy has just prepared some delicious chicken & stars soup when in comes his sister who looks into the pan and asks him what he's doing still eating like a child when he's a grown man.
She then produces a can of what he "should" be eating--and (Don't get me wrong!) I find nothing wrong with the soup she suggested, either. In fact, it looked really delicious.
But, again, so does chicken & stars soup.
I know from experience that it both looks and tastes delicious--yet, the commercial implies that, if this guy wanted to be seen as an adult, he was not only supposed to add this more "adult" soup to his menu in the future and, perhaps, decide that it was his favorite soup, but he was supposed to simply throw out that wonderful soup he'd just prepared and start all over again.
Of course, you don't see him throwing out the soup, but that seemed to be what was implied.
What a waste of perfectly-delicious soup! Doesn't it make your skin crawl!?! Does mine!!!
Coochie-Coochie Cooooooooooooooooo! Misty And Her Friends Want To Talk To You!
I think you know the kind of commercial I'm talking about.
It comes on late at night with the purpose of trying to convince men that they're able to offer them temporary relief for a particular kind of body-stiffness to the tune of just a few dollars per minute of "consultation."
With the exception of one of these women (One actually looked and sounded decent and intelligent--which made me wonder if she might not have been a minister using this approach to legitimately counsel needy male callers), the women they showed had this look and sound of the stereotypical bimbo.
We once had the experience of having those people on TV to end up being our houseguests.
Back in the early 1990s, my phone was being tapped.
This has never been proven, but there was certain information getting known to other people who couldn't have had this information unless they were privy to certain private conversations.
According to a friend of mine, the person who would have been most likely to have set this up was such-and-such a person.
This person, just a few years later, was (due to an unrelated crime) given the choice of leaving the state or living in a "condo" that was operated by the state!
Anyway, that, somehow, messed up the telephone wiring so that some neighborhood boys were able to call these 900 numbers and have them charged to neighbors.
I never received any of the charges, but at least two residential neighbors plus a business ended up with charges of over $1000 apiece on their phone bills.
One of the residences affected was that of my folks.
They called the phone company to say that they hadn't made any such area-code-900 calls. In fact, the times that they were made showed them to be dining out--or even in church!--when this was supposed to have been going on!
As with the other two places affected, the charges were removed from their bill.
However, my dad began receiving mail in a plain, brown wrapper.
The contents of the plain-brown-wrapper mail (which usually arrived about once-a-month) were advertisements for these phone-sex lines.
Daddy didn't try to stop them. He just let the people go ahead and send them, and he let them pile up unopened. Said he just wanted to see how long they would be dumb enough to keep sending him material before finally coming to the realization that they weren't going to be getting any phone calls from him.
I saw the contents of the first package, and the one flier that stands out shows this lady in a kind of skimpy catsuit down on her hands and knees with a kind of nasty-looking come-hither look on her face.
She was chewing on a strand of her own hair.
She had written that my 73 year old, happily-married, and somewhat-prudish dad was her sex slave, so come on over--she had her whips, chains, and handcuffs ready!
Something interesting I would read and/or hear on TV or radio was that the people behind those sexy voices were often everything from little, old, blue-haired ladies to big, burly, tattooed, male motorcyclists nicknamed Bubba.
Otherwords, if you could do voice imitations of pornographically-sexy, young chicks, you had a well-paying, graveyard-shift job!
Nothing More Than A Big, Long, Blankity-Blank-Blank-Blank Commercial!
I think that it's perfectly okay that Jed Clampett and his clan made it known that the top-favorite breakfast cereal in their household was Kellogg's Cornflakes, just as I also don't mind knowing how much ET enjoyed eating all of those Reece's Pieces that his young host offered him.
It's also fine and dandy with me--in fact, it's rather sweet--that there's a cereal named in honor of Fred Flintstone's daughter (not to mention a vitamin celebrating BOTH Pebbles & Bam-Bam).
And I grew up watching The Mickey Mouse Club--and, even years later when I would find out that it might actually be considered a program-long commercial for the newly-opened Disneyland, it didn't make me like it any less.
My late, great friend, Michael Steven Clem, used to have this favorite expression: "Some folks got it--Some folks don't!"
If The Mickey Mouse Club were, indeed, merely a program-long commercial for Disneyland, it would still fall under Mike's "got it" classification.
What "don't got it" are some of these commercials-posing-as-cartoons that make it so obvious that this is all they are.
What I mean by that is that they've been, obviously, flung together in a hurry with little attention being paid to quality when it comes to plots and animation.
Their main purpose seems to be trying to hit kids in the face with a message that the thing they should be doing next is to threaten their folks with "I'm gonna hold my breath until I turn purple!" or (worse yet), "I'm going to paint our entire house--along with the car and the landscaping--purple!" if they don't break down to buy the latest "improved" version of the toy/game being advertised.
Three Rather Silly Radio Commercials
When I was of that age between grades one and twelve where I took the bus to and from school, I remember three rather ridiculous commercials.
One of them was for a construction company locally owned and operated by a guy named Al Brewster.
The commercial would keep having this "voice of God" type of voice repeating at least three times "A. L. Brewster Plywood!" It was so ridiculously-boring, and I was like "Let's get this blasted commercial over with and get to something interesting like music!"
So, the "voice of God" and I would do this duet:
"A. L. Brewster Plywood!"
"Aw, shut up!"
"A. L. Brewster Plywood!"
"Aw, shut up!"
"A. L. Brewster Plywood!"
"Aw, shut up!"
Then there was this one about:
"Which dog is the healthiest? Dog Number One?"
"WOOF!"
"Dog Number Two?"
"WOOF!"
"Dog Number Three?"
"WOOF!"
Then, a spiel about how having your dog eat a certain brand of dog food would make him/her healthier than the average dog and why.
Finally, the commercial would end:
"Which dog is the healthiest? The one who said..."
"WOOF!"
The last one wasn't exactly a commercial, but, instead, a dramatic way of announcing that a sports report was about to come on.
It would give the title of the program, followed by a long, loud tweet on a referee's whistle.
Went something like:
"WHUT Sports! Tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!"
Actually, I thought that all three commercials were rather amusing, even if they were ridiculous and boring!
SPAM Traveling Incognito
Have you noticed how SPAM wants to be opened so much that it often disguises itself as everything from a Mailer Daemon failure notice to something that sounds personal.
That is, it does so in its subject line.
But open it up, and you'll find some sort of nonsense about naked men and/or women wanting to get it on with you or something just as ridiculous.
If you're sending me pornographic SPAM, at least be honest about it and tell it like it is in the subject window.
Either way, it's going to be going into the trash, so why not save us both some precious time and send it elsewhere?...YAWN....
Oh yes! I'm tired of that stupid letter that keeps going around from the boyfriend who is so mad at his ex-girlfriend that he's going to share naked pictures of her with the world!
That letter is so old that the ex-girlfriend must be at least 90 years old by now--and, as a straight female, I could care less anyway!!!
That's all from me for right now! Don't forget to check out the other rants!
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Epinions.com ID:
AinsleyJo
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Member: Ainsley Jo Phillips
Location: Anderson, Indiana
Reviews written: 270
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I'm hosting a write-off: http://www.epinions.com/content_5362983044
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