Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
My Commercial Ideas
Tuesday
May 30, 2006
There's a Gatorade commercial in rotation on TV right now (you see it during NBA basketball games sometimes) that show various athletes as kids but with bobble heads, i.e. adult heads on kid bodies, playing various backyard sports. It has a Toy Story level of animation to it, and it's pretty cool, particularly by advertising standards. Plus it has two athletes I'm a fan of in it, Peyton Manning and Derek Jeter, so it's alright by me.
It did get me thinking: I wonder what collection of athletes would be the most annoying/disturbing to see in that ad. A short list: Karl Malone, Kevin McHale (a giant head of him would be frightening, plus even his tiny body should have an inordinate amount of armpit hair), Jake Plummer with the Key West Butt Tickler moustache (the file photo that was used in every NFL broadcast last year), Ville Nieminen (tried to break Vinny Lecavalier's skull in Game 4 of the 2004 Stanley Cup Finals), Barry Bonds (his head would be twice as large as anyone else's), and Nykesha Sales, the women's basketball player at Connecticut who was allowed to get a freebie basket to set the school's scoring record after suffering a season-ending Achilles tendon injury in 1998. If it wasn't so basketball-heavy, I'd throw in Steve Nash, just because of his annoying mop top.
|  | I think the bobblehead maker was pretty kind to Kevin McHale on this one. Where's the authentic pit hair?
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The ad campaign could be fantastic. Karl Malone would kick people in the junk and Kevin McHale would clothesline people with impunity (imagine Plummer being on the taking end of most of that.) In another ad, Bonds' skull and jaw would get larger and larger during the spot, until by the end where his head would become too heavy for his body and he'd fall over. And in another, Nieminen could break Sales' leg with a running swing with a hockey stick (during a basketball game, no less.) The gang would allow Sales to get a sympathy basket... only Steve Nash would run in and steal the ball. I'm not sure how much Gatorade it would sell, but the possibilities are endless.
Then again, ideas like this are probably why I'm not actually making TV advertisements...
I find it horribly annoying when law enforcement organizations lobby and/or speak out for pieces of legislation. Those who enforce the law should not create the law, lest we complete lose our already perilous system of checks and balances. On the website for WRAL-TV, I read a story today about how North Carolina is considering phasing out video poker machines. You know, taking away another right of the people to do as they choose. From the story: A spokesman for the sheriffs' association read a statement in the committee backing the new legislation.
What in the world does a gambling law have to do with the sheriff's department? Gambling laws, just like any laws that try to oppress people from doing what they want (versus those that protect the public from the violence or malfeasance of others), will simply send the activity underground... which only makes the job of the sheriff's department more difficult. So support of that doesn't even make sense. But in Puritanical America, often times things don't make sense.
I watched the movie Aliens last night, and I was amazed with how good it was. Last month I saw Alien, and I was underwhelmed. But I heard so many good things about Aliens... and amazingly they took the same concept from the first movie and made it shine. That is the case of a sequel that outshined the original. Though, I do feel that I was better off seeing the original before seeing the second movie, even though the first Alien wasn't anywhere nearly as good as its IMDB score would indicate.
After multiple viewings and some reflection... I still haven't figured out Mulholland Dr. I think I have an idea of what it could be (a fantasy of how life should be in one character's eyes melded with the stark reality of how her life really is), but trying to make sense of a David Lynch movie is a near impossible task.
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