NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! YYYYYYEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
Day 4 of the Pop Culture Hall of Fame voting. As we’re doing commercials tonight, the cultural significance more or less goes out the window, and we’ll mostly just be voting among ones I found the best or most interesting (with the very large exception of one commercial that was simply too terrible to be ignored). Some of them you might’ve seen a thousand times too many, some of them you might not have seen at all (and I’ve included YouTubes for all I could in case), but they were the ones that best filled in the cracks of my 2007 TV watching experience–I think I’ve already written about at least half of ‘em for this blog, in fact. In any event, don’t forget to vote and such–up to five, with an optional write-in vote (though several of you have been writing-in several, which I guess is OK), either in the comments box or to fadeout95@gmail.com. And if you want, you can wait until the end of the week, when I’ll compile a list of the nominees, and you can just submit one big ballot–for those of you yet to vote in any of the polls, I can only assume that this is what you’re doing.
I’m not sure exactly when or why Wendy’s decided they were marketing to such a fringe audience, but man did their ad campaigns get surreal this year. The “Hot Juicy Burger!” ads–featuring setups like a forest full of people kicking trees, and a wide open field with everyone running and jumping into a hole in the middle–were weird enough, but this gem, seemingly combining German Expressionism, Japanese Monster Movies and Beatlemania, unified by the unforgettable tagline “Obsessing over celebrity–that’s wrong. Unless that celebrity is BACON!” I think has to take the cake. The fact that it also happened to promote the best Fast Food item of 2007 shouldn’t hurt its chances in this poll none either.
“But You Gotta Do…What You Gotta Do”
Ah, stealing. In what must sadly rank as his most high-profile acting gig in years, this Gatorade commercial sees Harvey Keitel acting as an angel on Derek Jeter’s shoulder (good or bad angel I’m not sure, or is that the point), advising him to take second base, despite that the pitcher keeps looking over and the catcher’s “got a gun” (I presume he means a good throwing arm, though the commercial would’ve been a lot funnier if the Angels catcher had actually pulled out a semi-automatic and mowed Jeter down on his path). This is all when and good, but it’s Keitel’s use of a word that must rank in the top ten in the history of the English (err, Yiddish) language–”schmendrick”–that really seals the deal. I’d like to think it’s the word that really gives Jeter the push he needs, like “Hell naw! I’m not lettin’ no schmendrick get in MY way!” And yes, that is the way Derek Jeter really talks (presumably).
57,000. That’s how many google hits there are for the phrase “IDK, my BFF Jill?” One of the few commercials to actually break into larger pop culture in 2007, you could spend hours on YouTube just watching the remixes, recreations and edits of this video–the dance remix where they set it to various internet phenomena is pretty good, but for my money the version that slows the commercial down by half is one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year (for some reason). Still, the original reigns supreme, a piece of multi-leveled hilarity that demonstrates the generation gap (or, more specifically, ad men’s misconception of it) better than anything else in 2007. The one where the grandmother says “IDK, my BFF Rose?” is an underrated sequel, for the record.
Neither of these Bud Light gags were quite good enough to deserve their own entry, but as two of the best commercials from the Super Bowl and World Series (respectively) from the most reliable quality sporting event commercial source of them all, I figured a combination was entry-worthy. The Stairs one especially still slays me, just because the set up is so perfect–why would the guy keep glasses behind his couch, anyway? And perhaps more pressingly, who has a staircase that only leads down in the middle of the living room?
Talk about a pop culture fan’s dream commercial come true. Bruce Campbell perfomring a lounge version of “Hungry Like the Wolf” to a bevy of beauties in a lush, faux-60s setting? Not too shabby. More than just the cachet attatched to it, I love how abstract this commercial is, especially for a deoderant ad, not exactly a commercial sub-genre known for its out-of-the-box thinking. No dialogue (minus the utterances of the ad’s new one-word catch phrase), no real use of the product, just Bruce and the ladies mellowing it out. The clip’s secret weapon, though? The whistling hook at the end, possibly the most quietly insiduous ad jingle of the year.
I Wanna Be a Cowboy
In what is proving to be an all-around banner year Cowboys QB Tony Romo, his greatest performance might still be found in this SportsCenter clip, ’07’s best entry in what is quite probably the most consistently quality ad campaign of the last decade. Looks like ESPN has pulled it from YouTube, and only has the inferior (though still pretty funny) reception ad up on its website, so I guess I’ll describe it–SportsCenter anchor Scott Van Pelt is walking down the building’s hallway when he notices loud music coming from a dark room. He opens the door, and Romo is there partying with a bunch of chicks. Upon noticing Van Pelt, the music is turned all the way down, and the party instantly grinds to a halt, and they have the following dialogue (transcribed from memory, so might be off).
“Hey, Tony.”
“Hey, Scott.”
“I’m done with the show.”
“…OK.”
“Yeah, guess I’ll go home…probably watch some TV…”
“…Cool.”
Van Pelt eventually leaves and closes the door behind him, at which point the volume is instantly turned back up (the song being played is revealed to be Boys Don’t Cry’s “I Wanna Be a Cowboy”) and the window’s blinds are lowered. “This is SportsCenter.”
Hey, I’m just glad Boys Don’t Cry is finally getting its much-deserved introduction to the next generation.
As more devoted IITS readers will no doubt recalled, over this summer I offered a small premium for any fan willing to create me a .gif of the asian metalhead from the Dunkin Donuts “Rip Things in Half” commercial, which as you can (hopefully) see above, was actually created by an IITS reader named Katie. Though the thing still refuses to play at full speed on my computer, and though Katie generously refused my cash reward (less because she, say, thought reading my blog was its own reward, than because she seemed to think it was sort of sad that I was willing to pay so much for it), it helps me to sleep easier at night to know what will probably go down as my favorite shot from a 2007 commercial will be so forever immortalized.
We all new that it was a great commercial when we first saw it in the Super Bowl in February. But just as Joy Division’s Closer instantly took on new relevance upon singer Ian Curtis’s death later that year, so too does Robert Goulet’s ad for Emerald Nuts take on a retrsopective sense of tragedy now that the great entertainier is no longer with us. Perhaps it won’t really hit viewers until the Montage of Mortality at the Oscars next year, when the slow-motion image of Goulet crawling away on the ceiling will eventually just be too much to handle.
“I’ll Tell You One Thing They Can’t Insure…“
I dunno what it is exactly about arrogant pre-adolescents that I find so utterly hysterical, but GEICO’s Loren Wallace series (and yes, apparently it is Lauren or Loren and not Warren, much to my surprise) featuring the titular over-confident auto racing tyke–was the one group of ad campaigns I simply could not ever turn away from when it was on this year. The classic quotes came fast and furious–”I didn’t say I wouldn’t go fishin’ with the man!” “I’m a hundred miles away, son. Ready to strike.” “Listen…go kart trick…grocery store…those remote control boats…when it comes to Mike Wallace, the story ends with ME putting HIM in the wall.” This kid should be bigger than Abigail Breslin by now. And have more Oscar nominations.
So yeah, this commercial is bad. Really bad. There’s nothing about it that isn’t an antithesis to good. The fact that the douche says “1, 2, and C” when listing his rules, the grossly inappropriate use of Devo (and I don’t even like that song), the terrifyingly unfunny attempt at a mid-ad plot twist…seriously, if terribleness was a delicious ice cream flavor, this commercial would be double chocolate mint caramel fudge swirl. And yet…it’s utterly hypnotic. It is so titanic in its bounting heaps of awful awfulosity that I simply couldn’t exclude it from at least the nominee stage of the hall of fame. After all, no other commercial this year was such a subject of debate among me and my friends–mostly about whether the twist meant that that the guy’s brother was trying to tell him “don’t be like me, I’ve wasted my life dating women with dragon tattoos, owning lap dogs and not getting chili on my Nachos Bell Grande!,” whether it meant he was deliberately trying to trick him into the bad decision of getting chili on his Nachos Bell Grande out of sheer malice, or if he was just being a gigantic hypcoritical douche for no real reason. I tend to drift towards the latter.
Honorable Mention:
1, 2, 3, 4
Sir Charge! (Actually I just forgot about this one until it was too late, feel free to vote for it)
NOOOOOOOO!!!!! YEEEEEAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
“It…Gets..Me…Pumped!”
Impossible is Nothing.
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By: Andrew Unterberger Published on: December 14th, 2007 |