That Poor Trix Rabbit

This post could be the start of a multiple part entry about breakfast cereal advertisements and mascots. Unless I decide after post it that its lame, in which case it will be the failed pilot episode of me discussing Dig 'Em.

(Remember Dig 'Em?)

I started thinking about Tony the Tiger and his ilk after looking for more mascots wearing sunglasses to put on my site's logo. I noticed after putting Joe Camel, Spuds Mackenzie, and the 7up cool spot on the logo that a lot of mascots wear sunglasses. This is not surprising given that sunglasses still constitutes "hip and edgy" to 50 year olds who are trying to convince the key demographic of18 to 25 year olds that their product is cool. Except in the case of Joe Camel where they were marketing to 14 year olds. (No, really (via wikipedia) (which links to pdfs of original court documents.) )

The earliest marketing I can actively remember influencing me-besides commercials for TV shows and movies-is TV commercials for breakfast cereals, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit ads and mascots that I liked or disliked when I was a kid and see how they hold up. It would be impossible to be objective about ads I enjoyed when I was 6, but since this site has never been about me being objective I'm not too worried.

Unlike with a lot of other products, breakfast cereals ads have to convince kids that they will be delicious and taste like candy covered in candy, submerged in milk, but not be so outlandish that mothers refuse to buy them for their kids. Sort of like how the A-Team T.V. show had explosions and car crashes to appeal to kids but you saw everyone involved coming out unscathed to keep parents from worrying. Except in this case sugar was the explosions, chocolate was the car crashes, and vitamins and whatever the hell Riboflavin is were the people walking away unscathed. (Don't worry if you lost me on that, I just confused myself with that metaphor.)

This line was definitely crossed by products such as Cookie Crisp, which seemed to be daring parents to be seen buying something so obviously bad for their children. Or at least it was in my childhood household. We would eat lots of frosted flakes, and eat lucky charms intermittently, but Cookie Crisp was viewed as a dessert. Looking back at the ads this was rightfully so. Corn flakes were long excepted as okay for breakfast, and people had been putting sugar on them for decades, so Frosted Flakes seemed pretty innocuous. Lucky Charms at least had way more of the cereal pieces than the marshmallow pieces, and since the marshmallows in it were really made from saw dust and elmer's glue, they couldn't have been that bad for kids.

But Cookie Crisp made no pretensions about being healthy, Cookie Crisp didn't even seem to make any pretensions about being an actual cereal. Someone at General Mills seemed to have just crudely scrawled the word "cereal!" in sharpie on some boxes of regular cookies they had lying around and put them in the breakfast aisle of the grocery store.

The folks at General Mills probably created this beast not with the primary goal of making a profit but instead just for their own personal amusement. Knowing full well that after it was released they could go to the supermarket for years to come and get so much joy out of watching the inevitable cold war stand off between mothers who made the mistake of taking their kid down the cereal aisle and now had to talk them down to a slightly less overtly terrible for you cereal, like, well pretty much anything, even CoCo Puffs at least doesn't have the word "cookies" in the title.

Despite its name and reputation, Cookie Crisp, at with its current listed ingredients, appears to be no better or worse for you than Frosted Flakes. I'm not sure what its nutritional content was when it debuted in 1977, but according to a copy of the nutritional facts from this weight loss site, cookie crisp only has 1 more gram of sugar per cup than frosted flakes and pretty much the same number of calories, calories from fat, and vitamin content.

So maybe Cookie Crisp's marketing of: "Cookies for breakfast! look this cereal is so bad for you this guy and his dog have to resort to a theft to eat it because their mom won't let them eat Coooooooooookie Crisp!" wasn't the smartest idea on their part. General Mills probably should have made more of a marketing effort to convince parents that the cereal was not so terrible that it would instantly give children diabetes on contact.

Here's the type of ads I remember for cookie crisp, with a burgler and his dog trying to steal cookie crisp while a cop chases them.



Did they say the title of the cop chasing them was "Cookie Cop." That job sound delicious.

The animation in this is way superior to the actual animation for the TV shows I watched as a kie. Look back on something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its drawn with tell tall flatness of cheap animation. But this ad is pretty lush looking. I mean its not Don Bluth, but its handsome animation considering its a 1990's cereal commercial.

Here is a much less frenetic commercial from the 1980's proving the continuing decrease in children's attention spans:



Why is the cop dressed like a british Bobby? and why does he have a squad car if he only patrols a table? I guess these are silly questions, but I'm glad the cop and robber weren't depicted as being tiny tiny people when I was a kid. I think after seeing that kid almost get eaten by Rick Moranis the cheerios cereal in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, I would had been sifting through my cereal with a strainer worried that I was going to eat that tiny little bandit.

Tune in next time for a discussion of Tony the Tiger's evolution from cartoon tiger to All-American athlete.

The internet gets revenge on me for complaining about repetition in streaming video ads

Back in my entry about celebrity pitchmen from last week, I complained about having to see the same ad with iggy pop arguing with a puppet 80 times in a row while watching videos on topgear.com.

The internet apparently listened to this complaint and decided to punish me right now as I watch a Mythbusters special on Discovery.com. During this video 3 different ads for the store Target alternate. This should be preferable to the same ad over and over, and it would be, except all three of these Target ads are infuriating in their own unique way, and not knowing which one is going to make its nails on a chalkboard like presence known to me during each commercial break is somehow worse than if target had just shown the same terrible ad during each break.

Its like having to open a door but knowing that behind it will be someone who will either: punch you in the face, kick you in the balls, or be Charles Barkley rapping about tacos, but the dread of not knowing which of these three things awaits you makes the whole experience worse.

I suppose its not actually quite as bad as all that, so maybe that should be Target's new slogan. Target: its better than being kicked in the balls.

The first offender is an ad promoting the fact that Target is selling crap with the Toy Story 3 logo etched into it. All Pixar movies are some of the best ever made, and since I am a grown man who owns a Cars backpack, I clearly have nothing against Pixar selling merch. But if Target is gonna make an ad about this, why did it have to be somewhere between bland and annoying in the newly created Strictly Commercials "Heigl Index" scale. Case in point:



The main thing that bothers me about this ad is that it takes characters that have a huge cultural resonance with anyone age 30 and under and gives them absolutely nothing to do in the ad. The dialogue is generic and ranges from cliqued (Buzz acting like a space ranger) to completely out of character (the ghost of Jim Varney wanting to look tough?).

Like I said, I get that its just a target ad, and Target and Disney executives want their money, because have illegitimate children they need money to pay off, but how hard is it to give these characters something interesting to do in this ad?

I'm sure that voices in this ad are not of Tom Hanks or Joan Cusack, but I honestly don't think the ad sucking has anything to do with that fact, since Target didn't take anytime to think of anything interesting for the characters to do or say, they could have had Tom Hanks read the lines for Woody or Bea Arthur read the lines for Woody and the lines still would have been boring and out of character. (Actually this ad would have been supstainally improved if Woody had been voiced by Bea Arthur, especially if they had just used old clips from her in the Star Wars Christmas Special.)



I think the main problem is just that the commercial suffers from the same thing I was discussing in my post about wasted flesh and blood pitchmen. If you bother to get a big name, spend the time to write a commercial built around them.

Since this has apparently devolved into a post where I discuss cross promotions not doing justice to computer generated children's toys, I'm just going to run with it. Here is a Visa ad, it isn't amazing or anything, but makes far better use of the characters:



This ad gets around not having Tom Hanks by having the actor delivering his lines say them all as fast as possibly, and Jesse, the character played by Joan Cusack, doesn't actually say any lines at all.

Unlike the target ad something actually happens in this spot, it has something to do with the themes of the movies, in that its about trying to keep a toy form getting separated from the group, and unlike the target ad it doesn't lazily take place in a white background, but actually involves the toys spliced into live action footage of a store.

Though I suppose I shouldn't complain to much about having to see the target ad for one out of every three commercial breaks in between the video I'm watching. I could have to watch this Toy Story 3 and where children chase a computer generated version of the damn Aflac Duck around. Sadly it does not end with the children catching the Aflac duck and roasting him on a RonCo Showtime Rotisserie (i'm not gonna bother wasting space on my blog posting the video since it just a scene from the movie with the Aflac duck inserted into it.)

The other two Targets ads that were rotating, weren't quite as offensive to my delicate sensibilities as the toy story one, but still bugged me. Here is one stating you can buy Coppertone at Target:



I guess what bothers me about this ad is that it seems to be saying, "are you red-headed and therefore burn easily? My oh deary me! I'm sorry for your crippling handicap! you should go to Target posthaste and buy all the Coppertone they have you pasty freak!"

Also why is this a target ad only of a single bottle of Coppertone? shouldn't the ad instead point out you can buy everything you need for the beach at Target? Because if the only thing I can buy for the beach at Target is sunscreen, I'm really not inclined to go to a store 20 minutes away from my house to buy something I can get at the corner store.

But maybe I'm looking at this ad the wrong way. Maybe I should take it more at face value. Maybe its aimed only at families made up entirely of redheads who show up at the beach and are worried about getting burned. Maybe these families brought their computer along to the beach and and are streaming an episode of Mythbusters from Discovery.com and notice this ad with a identical family in it. With this they realize they must leave the beach and drive past the hundreds of stores selling beach accoutrements in order to drive back onto the mainland and find a target.

Or maybe I'm thinking too hard entirely about this and the ad was simply trying to point out that people with red hair are obligated to shop at Target, since it has a red logo, or Target will hunt you down and kill you like the mangy dog that you are.

Before I get too carried away, I'm going to switch to the third commercial. I tried google searching for a video of this ad, but didn't find one after two searches and decided that was the maximum amount of time I was willing to search for a target ad.

The offending commercial shows footage of a little girl, maybe 8 years old, doing little girl things like playing outside and wearing fairy wings while the narrator states, "on monday Mary likes purple, on tuesday mary like pink" this goes on until the narrator states, "and on sunday mary wonders what she will be into next week" as the commercials says this all the girls cloth change to be the color outfit the narrator describes.

Obviously a commercial for a big box store is going to try to get to go there and buy crap. But something really rubbed me the wrong way about showing a little girl acting independent and carefree with the message, "Your daughter is fickle and will change her taste in clothing every day. You must cow-tow to this need and buy your 8 year old daughter clothes in a new color scheme everyday or she will not be happy and will hire a lawyer to have her self legally emancipated from you. Target: Give us all your money!"

I would like to end this post by pointing that the first product to have its own infomercial, the famous/infamous Ginsu Knife, has a street named after it in Rhode Island. Rhode Island also at one point in 2000 decided to try to increase tourism by adopting Mr. PotatoHead as the states official spokesman, and building six foot tall statues of the spud around the city of providence, which is the only part of Rhode Island where anyone lives, because that state is the size of a pack of Uno cards. Mr. Potatohead, like the Ginsu Knife, was invented by a company based in Rhode Island.

This brings to light the fact that Rhode Island's sole export appears to be cheap novelty items.

When I read about the PotatoHead statues in 2000 it was in a short Newsweek article and I never saw a picture of them until trying to find a link to put about them for this post. I thought they were just big statues of the manspud to promote tourism. I had no idea they were Chicago "Cow Parade" style blank statues that artist were invited to decorate. I also was unaware that they would be way more disturbing than anything related to Mr. PotatoHead has any right to be. Exhibit A:



(Those photos found at mrpotatohead.net. More just as scary PotatoHeabominations can also be found at that same site.)

Okay I'm gonna break my own rules.

This video isn't advertising related at all, but I edited it so I'm gonna post it here. It was originally on of those educational videos designed to be showed in High School, but I made the world a better place by re-editing it so it would not teach anyone anything.

Shaqesque

The Shaq commercial I posted as part of my a million word long entry yesterday showed at shot of the scrabble board Shaq was playing on. I didn't bother to pause it and try to read all of the words starting with Shaq which Shaq had spelled out, but today I decided to. I'll show you a screen capture of it first in case you want to try to read them through the low res blur of youtube yourself.



(Words listed after a brief word from our sponsor)

She eyed...



His beard...



And said no dice...



The wedding's off--...



I'll COOK the rice...



Burma-Shave

You can find out what words are written by google searching, but I assure you I squinted at the screen and read them in all their low res glory myself. Because you, dear reader, deserve no less.

The words are:

ShaqAttack
Shaqtastic
ShaqFu
Shaqzilla
Shaqalici

and my favorite,

Shaqesque.

I wonder what qualifies something to be "in the style or manner of" of Shaquille O'Neal?

My favorite -esque word that I'm aware of being in the Oxford English Dictionary is "Pythonesque" which means in the style of Monty Python. Hopefully Shaq will get the credit he deserves and Shaqesque will be in the Oxford Dictionary someday.

Its little details like that game board that separate well produced advertising from okay advertising. I'm sure ESPN gets tons of free publicity from people re watching that video to see what the words on the board are. Or actually maybe I'm the only person who re watched it to do that.

At the very least they now have very high brand awareness in the me demographic.

How to Waste Money on a Celebrity Pitchman. UPDATED!

I've decided I'm not going to do an analytical entry about the Michael Jordon's new series of Hanes underwear ads in which he sits on a plane and is pestered by the guy in the seat next to him.

The reason people are talking about these ads is because Jordon is sporting a Hitler mustache in the ad. I wholeheartedly agree that Charlie Chaplin style mustache was ruined by Hitler and still has terrible connotations 70 years after Hitler's death.

However, Jordon's extremely ill advised facial hair doesn't really fit into my normal scope of cracking jokes about how inept the marketing is. The commercial that surrounds Jordon's Hilter 'stache is a terrible commercial, but I find it's awfulness annoying not amusing. Since actual script and production of the commercial exists in this Katherine Heigl-esque state of annoying in a way that causes me to want to punch things instead of crack jokes, I'm gonna skip it.

I don't always agree with the writer of the sports blog "With Leather", but his take on Jordon's upper lip is pretty funny.

"With Leather" also brought to my attention Charles Barkley's reaction to Jordon's facial hair. Which was: "That is one of the stupidest things that I have seen in a long time. First of all, I can’t believe that they let that commercial get on the air like that... When I am shooting the Taco Bell commercial[s] they have got this little woman making sure that every cinnamon twist and every piece of cheese is in order."

Which is all the excuse I need to talk about Charles Barkley's foray into rap music in the Taco Bell superbowl ad. I say rap but as others have pointed out, it was not so much him trying to rap as him succeeding at being Dr. Suess.



Before I get into this ad's obviously suck-itude, I wanted to point out that it ends with a shot of the moon. And the Dunk on the Moon commercial I wrote about a little bit ago with NBA player Lamar Odom features the moon even more prominently. Is the NBA doing some kind of cross promotion with the moon? Maybe the NBA has decided to do an NHL "Winter Classic" style outdoor match but have it be played on the moon, and all these shots of the moon are promoting it.

I think Charles Barkely can be pretty funny and a decent public speaker from the bits of seen of Charles Barkley on TNT's NBA halftime report and from him talking on about how he is going to run of Governor of Alabama on every talk show he appears on despite not actually being a resident of Alabama.

So if you pay to have a 6 foot 6 inch 250 pound Basketball legend as your spokenman, can't you think of something more interesting for him to do than walk across the street holding a box full of food and reciting a terrible poem.

Anyone could have walked around carrying food and said that little nursery rhyme. If you are going to shell out for a celebrity do something with them.

Swiftcover Auto Insurance has some ads starring Iggy Pop and a creepy puppy version of Iggy Pop that just as terrible as the Barkley Superbowl ad. These apparently only air in England but I had to watch about 80 of them when I was looking at clips of the automotive show Top Gear on their website, since they have a commercial play everytime you put on a video, even if it is just a 90 second clip.

I understand the BBC gots to pay the piper, but while I was on the site every single ad was the same ad for Swiftcover with iggy and this puppet yelling the name of the company at eachother for 15 seconds. I tried to find this particular swift cover ad to include below but I can only the several 30 second tv spots Iggy did for Swiftcover. Here is one with the same obnoxious puppet yelling at Iggy while he drives his car.



This is pretty much the same scenario of not taking advantage of the celebrity you paid for. He never touches a guitar, they didn't bother to license one of his songs for the background music, and he is interrupted and upstaged by the worst puppet version of a rock star since this one of Sting: (warning the Sting puppet in this childern's puppet film about the story of Peter and the Wolf in unintentionally the scariest thing ever. It lives at the deepest part of the uncanny valley where it eats characters from recent Robert Zemeckis movies.)



Not only does that ad not use any of the things that make Iggy cool-he even has a shirt on for god sakes-both that ad and this one, mention Iggy playing golf. the second ad even shows Iggy hitting some golf balls. Were these ads originally written to star Tiger Woods and an annoying tiger woods puppet, and then when Tiger Woods had sex with people who weren't is wife, did Swiftcover just hire Iggy Pop but use the same script?

Actually the second Swiftcover ad was banned by the the United Kingdom's Advertising Standards Authority and can no longer be aired on TV. Apparently Swiftcover refuses to sell auto insurance to anyone in the entertainment industry, and in that second ad Iggy states outright that he has Swiftcover auto insurance. So apparently he wouldn't have been an appropriate spokesman even if the commercials didn't suck.

Though to be fair I can see why Swiftcover will categorically not sell insurance to any people in the British entertainment industry. I mean look the kind of lowlifes who that group comprises: Maggie Smith, currently wanted for being the leader in motor-scooter theft ring; Ian Mckellen, who is notoriously London's largest trafficker of stolen Beta-max players; and Ralph Fiennes who hunts humans for sport.

After commercials that made and NBA great orate like the Cat in the Hat, and had Iggy Pop use a puppet and his golf skills to sell you insurance he is not illegible for, I thought I'd show a celebrity centered ad I really like. Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns is hilarious in this ad:




 don't want my comments to give away anything about this ad cause its cool, and I hate it when I watch a video on a blog and the best jokes from it are re-printed right below the video. So to put some space between the above video and my comment on it, I'm gonna write down another one of my favorite burma shave rhymes.   (As I did when I posted the space chimp ad a few weeks back)

The whale...



Put Jonah...



Down the hatch...



But coughed him up...



Because he scratched...



Burma-Shave

In Depth Analysis of Steve Nash ad:

You would think a Dos Equus parody would be tough to do since those ads themselves are so funny, but Nash has fantastic comic timing the the scenarios that put him in are great. This is a great example of playing to your pitchman's strengths. Nash has great expressions and this ad plays to that stregth by being extremely visual with all the silly outfits and his reactions to them. It creates an ad that fit's Nash's personality, unlike the Brakely and Iggy ads. Its also able to fit Nash without making this ad too obviously about him (he doesn't play basketball in it, or wear a jersey).

The folks at Vitamin Water create an ad that is awesomely unique and causes you remember the spokesman and the product, and is so funny and cool that it makes you associate the spokesman with it. I don't watch very much basketball because it doesn't have enough hockey fights, so next time I see Nash on TV his very presence will remind me of how cool he was in this ad, and therefore serve as additional advertising for Vitamin Water no matter what Nash is actually up to when I see him on TV next.

I figured I couldn't do an entry about NBA players in ads without something featuring Shaq. I think Shaq is awesome. This has nothing to do with his basketball playing ability. I know nothing about basketball. This is based on his Late Night with Conan O'Brien appearances and from lines people have sent me from his twitter and from the fact that he was in Kazaam in which he sang a wrap song with included the line "We ain't men! We Genies!"

So here's Shaq playing scrabble:



To conclude, I think its only fair since I put up three ads of from NBA players that I should put up an ad involving the NHL in someway, since I'm one of the three people in the United States whose favorite spectator sport is Hockey (my favorite sport to participate in is barroom brawling).

So here is a fake ad i got off of Puck Daddy parodying the 2010 NHL playoff ads. First off its much funnier if you watch one of the real ads to see the format so here is one below, but if you didn't feel like watching the real ad, I'll quickly describe it. All the 2010 playoff ads featured the slogan "History Will Be Made," and featured footage of famous moments played forwards then backwards with inspirational music.



There were a lot of parodies made of this but this was my favorite:

Auto show! Part Four: Mission to Moscow

Suzuki makes cars in addition to making their popular motorcycles. No one realizes this. I read a positive review of the new Suzuki Kizashi in Automobile Magazine a few months ago but still forgot about their entire automotive division, despite the car's name being memorable for sounding like the ingredient in an Odwalla fruit juice. Because of this I was surprised when I saw a Suzuki car display in the basement of the New York Auto Show. Suzuki themselves apparently forget they made cars also because the basement was reserved for truck displays and the Munster's drag racer. (Really)


Suzuki must have decided they were sick of no one remembering that they make a four door that is by all account well built but bland to the point where I've already forgotten what it looks like despite having looked at a picture of it 90 seconds ago to jog my memory so I can write this. (Though to be fair to Suzuki that may be because I looked at the Munster's car immediately afterward, which is a car so cool Rob Zombie wrote his best song about it.)

Lets put a picture of the flagship Suzuki car, the Kizashi, here for a point of reference:


I'm not really being fair to Suzuki by making fun of this car for being bland, it is no more derivative than any of Hyundai's or Kia's takes on family cars, and it has kind of a sporty look. It just doesn't do enough to stand out when it doesn't have voice of Jeff Bridges making me want to buy it like Hyundai does (and I will do anything the star of The Big Lebowski tells me to) or the cleverness of Kia ads which I have already talked about at length in this blog.

(But seriously Kia ads are awesome their fun red guy was even hanging out in 2D cardboard cut out form at the auto show)


Suzuki is not going to take having unmemorable cars lying down though. They decided to bring along a concept car to the Auto Show that was, well, I can most succinctly describe it by saying it would have been right at home at the Tokyo Auto Show in its early 2000's zany heyday.

(I am not going to stroll down memory lane to put the above Tokyo statement in context. This is obviously tangential, but if you read this blog you know it doesn't so much have a point as a series of overlapping tangents of various lengths.)

Back in 2001, Automobile Magazine covered the Tokyo Auto Show with an article that focused entirely on the ridiculous cartoon looking concept cars that were so common at the Tokyo show until this recent recession forced the Japanese automakers to scale back the divisions of their companies that apparently only existed to create ridiculous impractical concept cars for the Tokyo Auto Show.

These cars where never meant to be stylish or buildible. Most weird looking concept cars at auto shows in every city that is not Tokyo are built to attract attention but also to show off some specific new technology that will be later used in future production cars. Mercedes once built a show car for a European auto show that company itself stated was built entirely to show off the tires and suspension technology it had. The Tokyo cars were not like this, because all of the technology they incorporated was insane.

These cars all seemed to have been designed by Hayao Miyazaki after a long night of Jager and LSD. (actually come to think it the movie Poyno probably was also the result of this.)

One of cars shown in the Automobile Magazine article was a Toyota called the Pod. I just found a description of it on Wiki and it is even weirder than I remembered. The car had artificial intelligence developed by Sony, which allowed it to do things so ridiculous I cannot make them any funnier than this non judgmental description of them from wikipedia:

"The car could also judge the attitude and mood of the driver based on their reactions and how they are driving, and could offer advice on how to improve their current mood. The seats inside are like stools which could freely spin and rotate. On the exterior, the Pod could express its own feelings with coloured LEDs - red for anger, yellow for happy, blue for sad - and an antenna that wags, much like a dog's tail."

(this car also somehow managed to look ugly, boring, and weird all at the same time not an easy feet.)

So it was a car that can get angry, and will give you suggestions on how you can be happier (Hal9000 springs to mind, "I can't let you merge dave.") But the folks at Toyota didn't think all that was quite enough to make their car stand out so they found away to make this car uber creepy by giving it the ability to independently wags its antenna. The writer at Automobile summed up this Toyota nicely by stating all its weird features "where, either genius or insane or both."

This idea of genius, insane, or both, describes nicely the Suzuki concept car they brought along to the New York Auto Show. It's the perfect car for the Robot Beach Boys to drive on their 2087 reunion tour. Its insanity cannot be described nearly as well as it can be shown so it is pictured below:




This car has a roof made out of surf boards and with the whole contraption, including the surf boards, is painted a color that could only be created by eating a traffic cone and then vomiting it up.

I can make fun of it all I want but you and I will both sure as hell remember that Suzuki makes cars from now on. I really can't fault them for this. They obviously set out to create something stupid and ridiculous and exceeded beyond what I would have thought possible.

This beach buggy is not a convertible but it has no back wind shield and integrated surfboards welded upside to the A and B pillars, because roofs are for squares.

I assume this last item is a safety feature. This way if you are near the beach and your car falls off a small cliff and lands upside down in the ocean you can use the surf board roof to surf on your car to safety. When use a wave to ride your car back to dry land you don't even have to leave your car to sit and enjoy the sun, because instead of seats it has leather beach chairs:




(P.S. about this post's title: I remembered from my days as a video store clerk that there was a Police Academy sequel called Mission to Moscow. Due to my extensive research before using it as the title of this post, I discovered that it is in fact the title of the 7th movie in the series. Despite having seen a lot of dumb movies I've never had the desire to see any Steve Guttenburg movie that was not Short Circuit, so I've never seen any of the Police Academy movie, but 7 movies? thats 1 more than their are Star Wars movies, and 4 more than their are watchable Star Wars movies.)