The other night, I was watching "Louie" and saw a commercial for that new Christopher Nolan film about inhabiting dream worlds where nothing makes logical sense and everything is surreal. What's it called?
Oh, right. The 2010 Major League All-Star Game on Fox.
When your sport that used to be known as "the national past time" now can't draw flies, when the records that were held sacred to fans for decades have been shattered by men we now all know were chemically enhanced superfreaks that the league tries to pretend never existed, when your steadfast devotion to traditionalism and rejection of technology robbed a player of a one of your sports greatest achievements--a perfect game--what do you think would be the worst possible symbolic message you could send fans?
Gaze ye upon my works and despair! I'm going to go with "showing everything associated with baseball crumbling to dust." The only way this symbolism could be more clear would be if Peyton Manning jogged through at the end of the commercial and knocked over the sand stadium. 
Just as God created Adam from clay, so, too, are Chase Utley, Hanley Ramirez, and other top players formed from dirt. This game's being played at the Angels' stadium, right? They can't play on the beach...
Hey, guys! You like hot chicks? Good news because one of our greatest pitchers looks kind of like this hot chick! See?
The Kaiser has returned! He's ben hibernating beneath the sands of Southern California beaches and the only ones who can stop him are Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter!
Oh, I take it back. The stadium is on the beach. At least in the sense that all of California is a huge beach where people hang out in swimsuits all day and try to give gays the right to marry--at least, that's what it is if you live in Missouri and have never been there.
Sorry, buddy. Tonight, when she's with you, she'll be thinking about us. That's right. Major League Baseball is gonna fuck your girlfriend if you're not careful.
What the fuck? Where did the mutant kid come from? We just saw this stadium rise up from the dirt and tower over people. Now a kid who is taller than the stadium walks up to adorn it with an Angels logo. Is this a world within a world twist? It's like in Men in Black when the galaxy was in the charm on the cat's collar, but then in the end we saw that the Milky Way was inside a marble that alien kids were playing with.My take on this is that all the people on the beach in the earlier scenes, including the players, are all figments of the imagination of an autistic child--like the finale of "St. Elsewhere."
And where the fuck are this kid's legs? The distance from the bottom of his rib cage to the ground is about the same as the height of his head. That means everything from penis down has been lopped off. Holy shit! Somebody chopped an autistic child in half, but keeps him alive to build elaborate sand castles that he populates with his imagination. That shit makes the Saw movies downright reasonable.
Back in 2002, my general manager took me off the air for a month or two in an effort to make me and my fellow sports anchor, Scott Rossman, miserable enough to quit. However, my news director found ways to get me on the air doing feature stories in which I didn't actually appear. My motivation for most of them was to piss off my GM. Since Jack, the news director, was kind of fed up with the GM as well, he thoroughly enjoyed using me as a not-so-silent weapon.
One morning during spring break, Jack brought me a press release about a promotional booth Calgon was running on the beach. The "Ultimate Shower" offered the opportunity to shower with a model (and learn all about Calgon products). I decided to make it all about pissing off our ultra-conservative viewers by being news on small town television.
We did get complaints about the story, but not because of my nudity. People called to say the girls were "nasty." When producer Rebecca pointed out, "You do realize they were wearing bikinis while Jake was naked," no one seemed to care.
Every day on the way back from picking up the kids at school, I drive past this anti-meth billboard on 7th Street:
For example:
Or:
Mayonnaise has its place. It's serves as a protective barrier between bread and potentially sog-inducing sandwich ingredients such as tomatoes and pickles. It compliments the combination of relish and fish perfectly, both in tartar sauce and tuna salad.
But mayonnaise is a role player, not a star. Which makes it hard to advertise for the same reason baseball teams don't sell their season ticket packages by spotlighting their journeyman utility infielder.
Unfortunately, that doesn't stop Kraft. The company has elevated mayo to starring role status in the ads for its new product and the result (which is sadly not on YouTube nor the Kraft website) is about as watchable as The Super or Gone Fishin' or Jimmy Hollywood or 8 Heads in a Dufflebag--movies starring Oscar Award-winning supporting actor Joe Pesci.
The commercial features several women eating mayonnaise by the bucketful while dancing in long, flowing skirts. One slathers a piece of bread with a layer of mayo about a half an inch thick, then gently lays two or three small slices of a Roma tomato on top and presses it to her lips like its a lover who's been stationed in Iraq for fifteen months.
The ad gave me flashbacks to another commercial from years ago in which a woman dipped a stalk of celery into a jar of mayonnaise and used it like an ice cream scoop to shovel a glob of white goo the size of a toddler's fist into her wanton maw. I'd assumed was memory was long since forgotten, but there it was fresh as the day I first saw it. My uncle once told me that sometimes when he was riding the bus on rainy days, he'd find himself gripping his umbrella like an M-16 and would suddenly remember horrible things from Vietnam that he'd completely forgotten twenty or more years earlier.
I guess what I'm saying is whether its bashing some Vietnamese kid's face in with a rifle butt or watching a moderately attractive woman pouring whipped oil and egg yolks down her throat, the world is an ugly place sometimes.
Oh, and that mayonnaise commercials are gross.
This ad (from Detective Comics) really had an impact on me.
But the thing is, I don't smoke pot. I'm just really lazy and don't walk my dogs as much as I should. Hell, I even get upset when I have to get off the couch to open the back door and let them outside.
In a nutshell, I'm as lazy (or maybe lazier) than the potheads being vilified for their laziness in this ad, but at least they have an excuse. They smoke an illegal substance, the side effects of which include laziness (and a tendency not to shampoo one's hair as often as one should); I don't even have that.
The homophobia, ignorance, and misinformation of this 1993 PSA made me a little depressed:
So instead I made it a story about Green Lantern saving Freddy Mercury from a mob of deranged Queen fans demanding a curtain call.
Topsy-Turvy, in addition to having the worst name I've heard for an "arch-villain" in a long time, doesn't make a lot of sense to me. He can turn all of Gotham City upside down, but how does that get him delicious Hostess Fruit Pies with flaky crusts and real fruti filling?
Okay, so spare change and pies fall when the city is turned upside down. Hair and Batman's cape are also subject to the laws of gravity. For some reason, though, people aren't? Further, where is he going to "scoop" up the money and pies? He doesn't have a floor. Everything would just float off into the sky.
Technically, it wouldn't since there wouldn't be any gravitational pull from empty space. Everyone and everything would still be pulled toward the ground. I mean people in Australia don't walk around with their hair sticking straight up and their Hostess Fruit Pies gripped firmly with both hands for fear of losing them to the clouds.
Okay, if you think you're so smart, tell me what the hell Batman is doing and/or accomplishing. For starters, it's already been established that Batman is upside down in the first frame, but here Topsy-Turvy flips him over. Batman jumps up in the air and grabs Topsy-Turvy's ankles...
... and pulls the arch-villain toward him to punch his face? I think.
In the end, the police take the bad guy away still upside-down, which is the way everything should have been all along. I believe the artistic flaw was in turning the city upside-down in the first frame. Had all the people turned upside-down in relation to the city and the ground, Topsy-Turvy would have been a real menace. The pies, hair, cape, and money things would all make sense, he could scoop the stuff up off the ground, and people would be helpless to stop him while suspended in the air without any ground against which to brace themselves.
I'm all for keeping a positive thought. Aim high, kiddies! When you go into a task, expect the best.
However, sometimes you need to be a little realistic.
Case in point: if you're the inventor of Lazer Tag, it's okay to dream that kids everywhere will play your game and that it will become wildly popular, be the hottest toy of Xmas '86, and be adapted into an animated Saturday morning series.
Hoping the game will last, unaltered, for more than a thousand years and that its top players will replace golden calves as the false idol to worship in place of a Christian god may be hoping for a little too much.
"Will they be idolizing your statue in the year 3010?" Hell, count yourself lucky if you weren't getting swirlies in early 1987 for wearing that stupid ass outfit. Even as a Halloween costume.
"You're Lazer Tag? What, are you supposed to be dressed up as the product or is it more abstract than that, like you're supposed to be the concept of Lazer Tag?"
Seriously? Was there really a time when people didn't know how to get fat?
Maybe I'm spoiled by being an American in a time when obesity is at its highest rate in human history, but I would never have suspected this was a budding idea for an entreprenuership. Teaching people how to eat more food! Brilliant! We'll be millionaires!
The add pretty much lays out the secret. Follow the "high calorie plan." So what secrets could it reveal? "Have you tried donuts for breakfast? If so, try eight donuts for breakfast!"
It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer had to gain enough weight to get on disability, so Dr. Nick Riviera advised him to rub his food against a piece of paper before eating it. If the paper turns clear, it's the ticket to weight gain.
The pills are even full of fat! When was the last time you saw anything in this country advertised as having added fat?
My favorite description, though, has to be "pound-gaining calories." As opposed to those cancer-curing calories or math-problem solving calories that do nothing to add to your waistline.