Criag Ferguson's Kai Tan Whiskey Ad.

I think Craig Fegurson is easily the funniest person on network television right now*. Here is a clip from he show from about 3 years ago where he did a fake ad for a Japanese Whiskey. (I spell it with the "e" to honor my Irish relatives.)



This is one of the many jokes Craig has made in tenure on the Late Late Show about his alcoholism (he has been sober since 1992). I have a lot of respect of a guy who can make self deprecating jokes about actual problems in his life, it takes of bravely to be that open to strangers and a lot of ingenuity to make things he talks about (especially in his stand up) like drug abuse funny, while still being poignant, without being depressing for the audience.

Wow, that last paragraph got way to analytical and serious. I better end with something funny. I know. This isn't an actual ad obviously, but I would buy the hell out of any company that decided to use Jake Gyllenhaal enjoying his lunch to promote their product. Maybe PotBelly Sandwich Shop can start using these on billboards or something.**



Footnote(s)
*In include the modifier of "Network" because i would say the folks involved with the Daily Show and Colbert Report are just as strong in their comedy.

**I admit it is very unlike that either of the sandwiches that are making Mr. Gyllenhaal so happy are from Potbelly since they have not stores West of Texas at this point. But if you have ever PotBelly's Wreck sandwich with bacon you will understand why I decided it was the sandwich most likely to make someone that exited.

This post apparently just became an ad for PotBelly's. This also just because a post I will not be able to reread without getting very hungry.

Glen! Glen Glen Glen! Glen Glen... Glennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!

Post the Rocky III "Eye of the Tiger" Training footage* reminded me of that awesome starbucks commercials from a few years back where a singer followed a guy named "Glen" around and sung "Eye of the Tiger" to be about Glen.



Footnote(s):
*which I am aware is some random guy on youtube's edit, but it was the best clip I found, and i liked his inclusion of the opening credit.

Its scuba bicycling season everyone!

This ad is awesome.

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

Tony the Tiger's appearance sure has drastically changed through the years, more so than most of his cereal mascot brethren. For example, if you look at Toucan Sam from the 1950s he looks pretty much the same as the toucan on the Froot Loops box today. Compare him in the 50s versus today:






He is obviously drawn in a very different style today, but he has the same colors on his beak and he appears to be about the same propositions in terms of body to beak ratio, though at some point his wings became much larger and for all intents and purposes pretty much turned into hands. The only other major change I notice is that his head is light blue now instead of gray.

But Tony is another story. I assume his changed appearance was created to go hand-in-hand with Frosted Flakes positioning its cereal as part of an active life style. This culminated in Kellogg's "Energy Frosted Flakes" which I assume contain Taurine or caffeine. Or maybe they aren't any different from regular frosted flakes as marketing works in mysterious ways.

(Taurine, the stimulant in Red Bull, was originally found as a component in bull dung. I kid you not. It is now artificially manufactured. One questions why Red Bull chose to apparently name their product after the disgusting origin of one of its ingredients. Jell-O was wise enough to not name its product "Animal Bones.")

I've noticed that as Kelloggs has tried to position Frosted Flakes as a cereal eaten by active life-styled mountain climbing children, Tony the Tiger has gotten more and more buff. Look at Mr. The Tiger from the 1950s





Versus Tony the Tiger circa now:



That is one 'roided out tiger.

I guess its admirable for Kellogsg to want kids to be in shape, but they could probably do that more effectively by making Frosted Flakes have more vitamins and such, instead of keeping the same okay but not great-and certainly not grrrrrrrrreat-for you nutritional content, and just making the cereal appear to be better for you by drawing the tiger looking more and more like Barry Bonds, and showing the kids in the commercials playing baseball with the help of frosted flakes.

But if Kelloggs is just going to continue with the "Frosted Flakes makes you better at sports" campaign that they have been using for the better part of 20 years now, why on earth haven't they licensed the song "Eye of the Tiger" from Rocky III to be used in their ads. It really can't be that expensive to license songs by the band Survivor at this point, since 100 percent of their hit songs were "Eye of the Tiger".

According to wiki that song was used in Frosted Flakes commercials in the UK, but I am unable to find any video evidence of this.

So instead I will just post a video of "Eye of the Tiger" playing over the training montage from Rocky III, which is honestly what I would have ended this entry with anyway, even if I had found footage of a Frosted Flakes ad with the song in it.

Actually, I should just start ending all of my posts with clips of the training montages from Rocky movies, if only so that I can find them easier when I want to watch them.

Pringles makes everyother ad on earth now better by comparison

I think the worst commercial I saw this year up until now in terms of a money spent to suck ratio was that Dodge commercial during the Super Bowl who message was: Women suck so buy a really loud car. This ad was so obnoxious and insulting in its attempt to appeal to the mentality of a regular Joe American, that I assume it was actually an satire, or Dodge trying to win some sort of sick bet by trying to prove false the old adage, "nobody ever went broke by underestimating the public's intelligence."

But today we have a new winner of the prestigious "Strictly Commercials' Award for Worst Advertisement By a Company Valued At Over 25 Billions Dollars Award." Called the SCAFWABACVAO2BDA for short.

The coveted whoopie cousin shaped trophy that accompanies this honor goes to...
Proctor and Gamble

For the recent Pringles Banner from their company. (Pringles is owned by Procter & Gamble, which itself is a subsidiary of the Shineheart Wig Corporation.) Here is the ad reprinted below. I apologize in advance for giving it this opportunity to molest your eyes.



Everything about this ad is unspeakably awful. the product itself is called "Pringles Xtreme." I thought everyone on earth agreed about 5 years ago that calling products "Extreme" to try to appeal to young people was idiotic and would only result in snickers, but here is Pringles fighting the good fight to keep that cliche alive.

Also the product isn't just extreme. its Xtreme. Its so too extreme to star with a wussy letter like E, its so extreme it must start with an X to show its intense extremosity.

All I'm gonna say about the person that have pictured in the ad, is that I have honestly never wanted to punch a product model in the face more than I want to punch that guy in an effort to wipe that smug expression off his face. And hair haircut is only intensifying my hatred.

Moonshine + earmuffs= automobile accident

Here is a photo of a traffic saftey mural that is currently featured in the window display of the midmanhattan new york public library.

I like way the mural's equation is broken down. We have two distinct senerios written here. First: Walking or driving while distracted by cell phone use leads to cars running into road signs. The second is that drinking while driving or walking is apparently okay on its own, bit when paired with listening to music on headphones WHILE drinking, will lead to a car crash. Im glad i was made aware of this deadly combination. To think, for all these yesrs I have carefully made sure to not drink and drive, when I now discover it is perfectly safe provided one does not do it whilst listening to what appear to be the headphones worn by Bach on the cover of 1970's the moog synthesizer album "Switched On Bach".

I realize i am playing dirty pool by making fun of an public sevice ad designed by kids instead of professionals, but I'm pretty sure when out forefathers put the right to free speech in the bill of rights, they specifically were trying to protect our right to make fun of well meaning children for poorly exicuting a mural against drunk driving. Actually they probably had drunk horse riding in mind, but their spirit of our of the framers of our constitution is clear.

It'd also like to point our that I think its a bit unfair for this public service ad to toss walking while drunk in with drunk driving. Drunk walking is proven by the American Automobile Association to be the send safest form of drunk transportation, behind only drunk crawling.

Even more Man your Man could smell like.

This is apparently the all old spice guy all the time channel this month, I assure you I will post my long gestating article on Tony the Tiger once I remember why I thought he would be funny to talk about.

But for now, even more of the old spice guy:



Also my friend John Nappi showed me this 20 minute interview with the writers of the orginal spot who explain all the clever ways the production staff used to do that whole ad in camera. I was shocked that him getting on the horse and the sets moving around were all does with wires and ingenuity, I assumed it was all really good CGI. I somehow find the commercial even more impressive now, which I didn't think was possible.
(The explanation of all the cool practical effects by the writers of the ad start about 7 minutes into the video. Don't be turned off by the fact that the interviewer act like your insane uncle Morty. Its mostly the ad guys talking about the ad after the 7 minute mark.)

The Old Spice Guy is back

This has been out for about a month, but I only just saw it and felt the need to relay it to you. (Yes YOU specifically.)

Old spice did a follow up ad to the greatest ad ever. It would be impossible to top the original, but they did a good job thinking of an other series of clever scenes for the man your man could smell like to walk through.



I also found an equally not new video of the Old Spice Guy on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

(Wow, I have to pause for a moment. I've always thought Ellen was really awesomely funny since the 1990's, but apparently had never in the history of myself had to type her name out until just now. I failed trying to spell it and had to google it to find the spelling and for some reason am currently standing here* mesmerized by the fact that every other letter in her last name is the letter E. I can't think of any other celebrity whose name following such a stringent pattern.

We now return to your regularly scheduled programing, already in progress.)



The guy, named Isaiah Mustafa, is apparently a former football player and hopefully future star of a movie length version of this commercial. Its a pretty fun four minutes. Mustafa recites the script from the first commercial at Ellen's request, which is somehow even funnier as a dramatic reading without the background action.

Isiah Mustafa** just generally comes off and polite, and charming, and a man we should all strive smell like. Yowza I didn't realize how in love with the Old Spice Guy I was till I reread that previous sentence.


Footnotes:
*I do all my typing while standing up in the center of my room staring at a poster of David Hasselhoff***. It causes my prose to be of higher quality because I picture Hasselhoff judging me if I write something that would not be worthy of being read aloud by him while he dances to his own cover version of "Hooked on a Feeling." (The music video of which was recently declared as the result of a 20 year study by John Hopkins University to be the greatest thing ever created by humans or animals.)

**And how bad ass of a name is Isaiah Mustafa while we are on the subject? If he is ever in a movie where is plays a hardcore Bullet Tooth Tony style character the writer will have a tough time thinking of more Samuel L. Jacksonesque name for the character than Isaiah Mustafa. (Sort of like how Spill.com pointed out that Rupert Grint sounds much more like the fictional name of a Wizard than Ron Weaselly does.)

*** (A footnote inside of a footnote! Is your mind not blown. This like something out of Inception.) I would be remiss if I did not point out that my fictional poster of David Hasselhoff is obviously this poster: