Every once in a while, I see a commercial so vapid, so content-free, that I'm convinced it was made to deprive me of an opportunity to snark on it. This is one of those ads, but I'm going for it anyway.
This ad is not necessary. We see the phrase "for our loyal customers" posted everywhere all the time but we who live in the real world of consumers know that compared to potential customers, "loyal customers" are the dirt under the shoe of a company intern. The first idiot actually thinks that he got a deal for his family - free iPhones, which is basically like thanking the dealer down the street for hooking his family up with deep-discount heroin- because he's a long-time customer. He's stunned to find out that the even blander white family he apparently didn't notice was standing a few feet from his that they, too, got free iPhones even though they are brand new customers (the wife from central casting says they got free phones "even though ours were busted." Huh- so you already had iPhones, but they were all broken, but you were holding on to them anyway, huh? This is so plausible.)
The only slightly remarkable thing about this ad is that the family which is surprised by the generosity of Verizon is black, and the "you're nothing special, we got the same deal" family that puts them in their place is white. These days, I'd expect exactly the opposite. But that being said, all of these sad, phone-addicted morons should feel free to die in a terrible fire now for wasting my time.
I have to assume that this ad is meant to convince single people that they have a reason to take advantage of Get Two for a One Low Price deals by pointing out something we already know- that if we can't eat it all in one sitting, we'll have leftovers we can eat the next day. We were also already aware that quality pizza tastes fine warmed up- not sure what this has to do with Domino's, but there it is.
But jeesh, maybe showing a morbidly obese woman in her robe all hyped to start her day with leftover grease, starch and carbs isn't the best selling point you could have come up with, Domino's. This woman isn't anyone I want to emulate, thanks anyway. She should NOT be starting her day with a low-fiber, low-protein chunk of white bread slathered with sugary sauce unless her goal is to be ravenously hungry all day. Just sayin'.
It's not because it "stars" Scott Bakula as a 40-year old former High School quarterback who hasn't thrown a football in 22 years yet can still compete against guys half his age with twice his muscles and three times his muscle memory.
It's not because it features Sinbad as a 30-something former High School defensive tackle who "has one year of eligibility left" who despite not being in any kind of shape can compete against guys more than a decade younger than he is.
It's not because it also includes Roy Schneider as an obnoxious play by play announcer who is apparently hooked up to a loudspeaker so he can pretend he's doing television and call plays as they develop on the field because that's how that works. Schneider is actually only in this film to beat to death the schtick he was kind of known for from a few SNL skits in 1990 ("FUMBLEREENO! FUMBELAYA! THE FUMBELATOR!"), and his two minutes of total screen time is at least a minute and fifty seconds too much.
It's not because we see Robert Loggia slumming it as the worst coach of all time, reacting to dropped passes by screaming NO NO NO and throwing his playbook to the ground because We've All Seen That Before.
It's not even because Kathy Ireland shows up for about eight total minutes of screen time because There's Nothing In The Rule Book that says (insert nonsense that you can bet IS IN THE RULE BOOK.)
Necessary Roughness is really, really bad for all of the above reasons, but none of them are the reason, and all of them put together wouldn't make this the worst sports movie of all time. No, the reason this film fails so badly is because it takes concept that had already been done much better in Major League and would later be done much better in The Mighty Ducks- the Triumph of the Plucky Underdogs- and sticks it into the least plausible of all sports, college football.
Anyone out there ever WATCH a college football contest? On a weekly basis, a ranked team will defeat an unranked team by five, six, seven touchdowns or more. Last Saturday Ohio State beat a very good Kansas team by 44 points, and that wasn't close to the biggest blowout of the day. Every once in a while, yeah you see huge upsets, but those occur when an underrated squad ambushes a tired, overconfident or injury-riddled favorite. But in Necessary Roughness, a team of old, out-of-shape, undersized and basically talentless dopes walk into the final game of the season with an 0-8-1 record and end up defeating the UNDEFEATED NUMBER ONE TEAM IN THE COUNTRY which for some reason is in the same conference as the Scott Bakula-lead Loveable LosersTM. Oh, and did I mention that Bakula's team wins while playing Iron Man Football (in order to keep the "stars" on the field, the same players are on offense and defense?) Oh, and did I mention that despite the team being old, out-of-shape, undersized, talentless and playing Iron Man football, the same players play every game and NONE OF THEM SUFFER ANY INJURIES?
In real life, this team loses 100-0 every week except for the last one, when they play the national champs and lose 150-0 with the final three quarters being played with the loveable loser starters watching from the hospital. This is really, really bad because it doesn't even get over the ridiculously low bar that American audiences are willing to set for films of this type. We'll accept an undersized high school basketball team which includes a morbidly obese kid and a 110-lb. Michael J Fox beating a much more talented group of kids because it's Local High School Basketball. We'll accept a kid who has never been in a Karate Tournament and basically learns to fight on the spot ending up winning because hey none of us has ever been to a Karate Tournament and probably didn't even know they were real things. But we are so familiar with college football that this is just way too much for any of us to watch with an open mind. I mean, come on give me a break.
Oh, and Fred Thompson (RIP) is in this dumpster fire too. As if we needed another reason to avoid it. All in all, a completely forgettable film which is also an insult to the intelligence of anyone who even casually follows college football and which leaves us wondering why it was ever conceived at all.
1. If you buy that the people in this ad are Real People Not ActorsTM, well, I guess you're half right- they aren't "actors" in that they can't act. They are not, however, actual customers of some kind of mailing service who are in a Candid Camera/Punk'd situation and if you think they are, please show yourself out and don't come back.
2. I mean, the woman we see "was wanting to mail this..." and she has a letter in her hand. She looks like an adult to me. Which means she's heard of this thing called the United States Postal Service, which was founded less than a year after the signing of a piece of paper called the Declaration of F--ng Independence. Why is she going to some shipping company to have a letter mailed?
3. If this service is boasting of providing encrypted, totally private delivery of texts, well, what's the point in a country filled with people who carry on extremely sensitive conversations on buses, at the grocery store, sitting at Starbucks and basically everywhere else? The people who developed this thing think that they live in a country where people are concerned about privacy? Where did they get this idea?
4. Oh wait, Meta is behind this? The company that owns Facebook, everyone's favorite source of hate speech and election-altering misinformation which is currently losing billions in revenue and probably won't exist at all two years from now? That Meta? Yeah, pass. I mean, "not owned by Elon Musk" is a positive, but not THAT big of a positive. Meanwhile, I've watched this garbage several times now and I still can't quite figure out what they are trying to sell me here. Nor do I really care.
Or You're already dangerously stupid - why not use that quality to rid your wallet of excess money by downloading the FanDuel app?
I've already posted about how much I hate this phenomenon of advertising impulse gambling like it's some kind of fun activity you'd be involved in already if you weren't such a stick in the mud and not an addiction-creating, finances-endangering disaster waiting to happen. We've devolved so far from condemning gambling that we now have sites like FanDuel and DraftKings sponsoring pregame shows. In a few short decades we've gone from "drink this soda or you're a loser" to "drink this beer or you're a loser" to "drink this hard liquor or you're a loser" to "bet on everything imaginable or you're a loser," and I don't call this "progress." I call it pathetic and sad and more than a little scary.
I don't see this as innocent fun, especially but not exclusively because we are living in a time of stretched paychecks and flatlined 401(k)s. I see this horror as a gold mine for a few manipulative greedy scumbags who are too lazy to rip off the desperate the old-fashioned way- by opening a Check Cashing Service or offering Payday Loans or running a Rent-a-Center or pawn shop. I think these people would be offering free samples of crack* if it weren't for all these annoying laws. And who is going to pay for all this? The idiots who don't realize that gambling is as addictive as alcohol and sugar- which will also be heavily promoted in between ads for gambling sites. Good luck to the rest of us, and get ready for a wave of "I lost my family and my house because of my new drug addiction" stories.
*please note that ALL of these gambling sites offer their own versions of "free samples" these days.
It's such a simple concept: there are people out there who never really left college in their hearts. College was the peak experience of their lives, maybe because it's when they found their significant other or it's just when they were at their healthiest and most fit and (because they had the rights of adulthood but not yet the responsibilities) simply the Best Time They Would Ever Have. I get it. I really do understand the concept.
So- the concept goes- let's just create an imaginary community entirely populated by these people who insist on living largely in the past, pretending that they are still in school despite the wrinkles and gray hairs and full-time jobs and mortgages. Despite all that lame "adult" stuff the only thing that matters to these people is The Big Game coming up between Alma Mater University and The Other Guys. These people go around dressed in school colors and even paint their faces just like they did (or think they remember doing) when they were actual students at that school which I presume they live down the street from because that's where their hearts are and they can't bear to be too far away. How they go about their lives between January and August, when their team is not playing, is a mystery we're not supposed to think too hard upon. It would be like asking what the people of those entirely Christmas-themed towns in Hallmark Movies do between January and November. Better to leave such queries to ourselves.
But like all advertising concepts, this one had a shelf life and like way too many, that shelf life has been ignored so what we have pounding at us from our televisions every weekend is stale and monotonous at best, We Get It Move On Now obnoxious at worst. I don't want to meet anyone who likes these Fansville commercials because their limited supply of amusing ran out somewhere around 2019. Also, all this dramatic fuss is over a soda. A soda that tastes like cough medicine. I mean, come on. It's not even beer. It's SODA. That stuff you never touched when you were in college because YOU WERE IN COLLEGE. Are we supposed to believe that one of the things that the Fans of Fansville most fondly remember about their halcyon days in the hallowed halls of AMU was drinking DOCTOR PEPPER? So they had no social life at all back in college- and, judging from at least one "episode" of this long-running series which includes loony mom and dad sending their kid off to college with a 12-pack of the stuff- they don't want their offspring to have one either?
In the fall of 2005 my parents in Vermont lost power for three days as a result of a freak blizzard. The following year they invested in a generator. On the rare occasions it's been put to use, it powers about one-third of the house- it keeps the heat going, along with the electricity in the kitchen and....that's about it. And that's plenty because hey, it's for emergencies.
So someone explain to me why the people in this ad responded to losing power and having to switch to their EMERGENCY GENERATOR by USING AS MUCH ELECTRICITY AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE (I'm actually impressed that we don't see at least thirty cell phones being recharged during this massive party going on; was that scene just cut from the final version because someone said "maybe that's a bit much?") The drain that these idiots are putting on that generator is almost frightening- if they'll suck up this much juice when they are using their own gas to generate it, how do they behave when connected to the grid? It's like they are worried that people ten blocks away won't notice that they have power. Seriously, what the hell is going on here?
