Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Subaru's latest Love ad just ramps up the stupid....



The TV version of this thing mercifully cuts the pain down to about thirty seconds.  The internet version is a painfully drawn-out, hammer-to-the-brain-smarmy minute and a half of your life you will never get back.  Hey, I didn't tell you to watch it.

The punchline isn't grampa's "I Love Thoreau" bumper sticker (holy crap, we GET IT Subaru.  We didn't need that hammer to the brain!) It's the grandson asking if grampa felt compelled to lie to grandma and tell her that he was going fishing instead of surfing.  Because I guess grandma has no problem with fishing but would dissaprove of surfing because....reasons?  Maybe Subaru thinks that Thoreau fans are best known for lying to their wives?

Why can't this guy tell his wife he wants to go surfing with his grandson?  And what does a pointless lie about it have to do with "love" again?  And while we're at it, what does any of this mess have to do with Subarus?  I mean, WTF?

Monday, October 16, 2017

Yowie, this is stupid!



The thought of this pale, fat, stupid little kid eating enough cheap chocolate to collect all those stupid plastic animals makes me want to call Child Protective Services on his parents.  It also makes me want to hurt everybody.

And the punchline is that his "mission" to spend all that money to purchase and consume that cheap plastic-that-tastes-kind-of-like-chocolate isn't over just because he's managed to complete his collection, because hey look here's ANOTHER set to collect.  Strap on your African Safari hat and grab mom's purse, Stupid Fat Kid!  It's back to the store---err, jungle---for another encounter with the cashier---err, tribal chieftain....or something.....

I can remember when commercials didn't whip me up into a psychotic rage on a daily basis.  I miss those days.  I really do.  But what am I going to do when I live in a world where people are encouraged to buy Easter Bunny-quality chocolate so they can get a stupid plastic toy you used to be able to get out of gumball machines for a nickle and can still buy by the bag at the Dollar Store for 99 cents?  I mean, what the hell is going on here?  Are you people completely f--ing insane, or what?

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Domino's Soft Sell + Hard Sell = No Sale



I couldn't care less how much you love your stores, Dominos franchise owners.  Don't care how you got the money to start them up, don't care if they "mean everything to you," and sure as hell don't care that when the order came down from the people who REALLY own the stores to remodel, you were just fine with that.

So now that you've failed to win me over with your Tales of American Entrepreneurship....

I couldn't care less that Domino's sludge factories look more modern now, or include plexiglass partitions to allow stupid gawky kids to stare at the pizza-building monkeys who must really feel like they are in a cage, and wasn't working here for minimum wage humiliating enough without being on display like this?

And I'm sure you think that watching people smash windows and knock down walls in slow motion to some crappy rap song (I don't care how many YouTube commentors desperately "need" the song, btw) is super entertaining and all that, but it's not going to distract us from the simple fact that for all of the Spirit of the Small Businessman, the Glossy New Decor, or the Really Cool Destruction that went into making Domino's Lowest Common Denominator Pizza Distributors look different, this is just an attempt to put a whole lot of lipstick on a really, really ugly pig.  Because in the end, this is still just Domino's.  Adding giant pans of pasta isn't getting me through that door.  Improving the look isn't getting me through that door.  The only thing that could get me through that door is decent food- and I notice you aren't talking about making radical improvements to THAT anywhere in these ads.

So I'll continue to pass on the bland, flabby carbs and sugar, sorry.  Hope you own the rights to that music, though.  There are a lot of idiots on Youtube who apparently are willing to pay for it.

Subaru's Camping Dog commercial screams nothing but RUN!



Yeah, sorry, but the girl in the ad isn't anywhere cute enough to pull this crap.

You're taking your dog on a camping trip with your boyfriend?  Seek counseling, please.  Or just admit that you don't really want a boyfriend as much as you want to keep your relationship with your dog.

And, buddy?  Like I said in the first sentence- this girl isn't cute enough for this level of stupid.  There are worst things than not having a date on the weekend.  Unless you think that you're going to REPLACE that dog before too long, I'd really rethink this whole thing.  But heck, I guess there are guys out there who don't mind dating women who can't be parted from their freaking smelly mammal housemates.  I'm just not one of them, and I don't get them.  At all.

(BTW, anyone else think that I could just devote this blog to these Subaru "love" commercials and have plenty of opportunities to post?)

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

And I'm doing the Calling BS on Dairy Queen thing



This guy couldn't make it more obvious that he's a boyfriend doing the Daddy Thing - maybe, trying out for the role of daddy- and is in no way related to the little boy he's purchased a small amount of ice cream for to distract that boy from the honey barbecue wings and fries he's purchased for himself.

And even while he does his best to "do the daddy thing" in the hopes of finally getting the boy's mommy to rescue him from the Friend Zone, he's rather quietly waxing poetic about the good old days when he could wolf down real honey barbecue wings at Hooter's with his equally obnoxious, equally single friends.

So good luck with that whole "Daddy Thing," not-Daddy.  I'm sure this boy's mother will be super-impressed that you blew a whole 99 cents on that cup of ice cream so he wouldn't go without any lunch at all.  While you ate chicken and talked to the cameraman how cool it used to be to spend all afternoon at the sports bar guzzling beer and wings brought to you by hot girls in tight tops and even tighter shorts.  Takes dedication.

Monday, October 9, 2017

Ok now THIS is a funny ad, though I don't think that's what the makers of Jardiance intended...



So the guy in this ad is walking around town carrying a tablet and accompanied by a cameraman and an intern hauling around his pretentious director's chair, randomly asking people on the street if they have diabetes?  And if they say yes, asking them if they know that diabetes increases their chances of a "cardiovascular event?"  And if they say no, whipping out that tablet and showing them "evidence" in the form of a cheap powerpoint one of my ninth graders could have created in five minutes?   Really?

If any of this was even remotely sincere, how long did this guy have to wander around town before he finally found someone who answered "yes" to the question about having diabetes and "no" to the question about cardiovascular issues AND agreed to take part in a conversation about Jardiance which would appear in a national television commercial?  Did he just walk up to people who looked middle-aged and overweight, figuring "hey, they look like their are at least candidates for diabetes, and they also look like they have really lousy doctors who didn't explain all the risks involved to them?"

And I seriously can't get over that director's chair.  When does this guy use it?  It's only him and his cameraman- who is he directing?  Does he just use it to take breaks from annoying (and then frightening) total strangers on the street about their potentially fatal health issues Better Get Your Doctor To Put You On Yet Another Drug Right Now?  What the hell?


Sunday, October 8, 2017

Cars.com's Lie Detector ad - all the humor is in the comment section



Never mind the ad- it's even dumber than most car ads and even less to do with actual cars than most car ads.  In a nutshell, the message is that Cars.com makes car buying so easy that you might miss the "drama" of buying a car the old-fashioned way (personally, I'd rather walk into a car dealership and make the salesmen do their job, and I've never experienced any "drama" while buying a car- that's all on the salesman's side, I am the one who will make the decision which will determine if he makes money, after all- but that's just me.)

The car salesmen, sensing that the guy here does miss the drama, attaches him to a lie detector machine, and he goes along with it Because Commercials.  And his horrible shrew of a wife, instead of saying something like sensible like "take those stupid things off your fingers, these people are insane, let's go find the car at a dealership not run by insane people," decides to ask exactly one question that could only have been written by a male- "do you think my sister is prettier than me?"

Since the guy's response is to freeze and sweat and panic before screaming and tearing off the electrodes, I guess the answer is "yes" but he doesn't want to say.  So maybe this couple ends up in counseling instead of buying a car together.  Maybe the guy just decides he no longer wants to live with this manipulative, insecure harpy and decides to file for divorce and give her sister a call.  I don't know, because I'm kind of "never-minding" the actual ad.

No, just skip the ad and go to the comment section.  It apparently doesn't bother any of these mouth-breathing children that this ad has no punchline.  They all think that it's LOL HILARIOUS and at least one even suggests that it should have been a Superbowl ad.  That's much more horrible than this commercial.  The only thing that justifies this level of praise for a commercial as noxiously void of humor as this one is if the posters doing the praising are all paid tools of Cars.com.  That would still be sad.  But I'd rather think that was the case than believe that this many people wouldn't know funny if it crushed their skull with a hammer.  Which is also not a bad idea.