Subaru markets car directly at me

Here is a new Subaru ad it features:
1. An Irish-American Family
2. Midget Hockey
3. One of the kid hockey players being sent to the penalty box, because hockey goons are awesome.
4. The song "If I Should Fall From Grace with God" by the goddamned Pogues.



The only way this ad could be more directed at me is if one of the kids was wearing an Aquaman T-Shirt, the second kid was played by a Muppet, and the third kid was played by Conan O'Brien.

George Fucking Parros

George Parros: No helmet can contain his mane.

I'll be the first to admit this post doesn't have a damn thing to do with advertising. In the past when I've wanted to talk about the other things I read too much about such as hockey or cars  or movies, I've been able to tie it into a commercial.

That's not the case this time. I could try to justify this post as being some kind of extension of Tough Guy Month-(remember Tough Guy Month on this blog? That was rad. I should think of a theme for month of May. Comment with any suggestions. Maybe Booze month, folks seem to like it when I talk about booze ads here, and I know I like to write those articles. Anyway, I should probably get this paragraph back on track)-but the truth is I just think George Parros is fucking awesome and with the Stanley Cup Playoffs upon us, I wanted to mention the reasons for my opinion.

I started following the Anaheim Ducks because I thought it was so cool that Scott Niedermayer requested to be traded to the Ducks when they sucked and still dressed like cartoon characters, (away from 3 time cup winners the Jersey Devils) because as great as it was for him to win the Cup, he wanted to win it with his younger brother as a teammate before he retired.*

Now that Niedermayer has retired, my favorite player on the 2011 Ducks is easily George Parros. Feel free to argue this in the comments section, but I would probably rank Parros as tied with Duncan Keith for most all-around hardcore badass in the current NHL.

Parros is supposedly a forward, but he had as many assists in the 2009-2010 NHL season as I personally did, but that doesn't matter because that is not his job. His job is to punch things, he regularly leads the Ducks in penalty minutes and fighting majors.

Parros is pretty much a real life "Chuck Norris facts".  He has racked 694 career penalty minutes in 289 games. He only cuts his hair once a year, and gives all the hair from his yearly haircut to charity. He mustache is so famous that he sells official George Parros fake mustaches at the Ducks' shop at the Honda center, and gives the profits to charity. The mustaches are quite popular:

I would like to note this is an real, un-doctored picture of Snoop Dogg wearing a Parros fake mustache over his real mustache.

Parros is very active with charitable causes when he is not punching things. You can buy clothing which supports these charities from his website, which is of course called 'Stache Gear. A name which is extremely appropriate for Mr. Parros, but which would be even more appropriate for a website that sells Tom Selleck** themed clothing.

I am not looking up which charity Parros works with so that I can continue to assume it is one that aims to stop world hunger by punching things. One of the things you can buy on this site to help Parros smash the world's problems in the jaw is this awesome shirt:

Its a bit hard to see in the image StacheGear.com provides, but this is a stylized print of a photo of Parros punching someone in the face. The image they went with is probably not my all time favorite picture of Parros punching someone, but it is so hard to decide what photo is, every punch he throws is its own unique snow flake.

This shirt is currently completely sold out on Parros's site, and once it gets reprinted, he can probably sell enough to find the cure for whatever his charity is working towards, because honestly, who doesn't want to have the back of your shirt feature Parros mid-punch. When they get back in stock I am going to ask everyone I know to buy me one for my birthday so I can always have a clean Parros Punch Shirt to wear at all times. (For another fantastic picture of Parros at his day job, scroll down slightly.)

Yeah Parros is getting punched at the particular second this photo is being snapped. But you can see from where his hand is and the face the guy on the Flyers is making that the Flyer just got finished being punched in the face by Parros. Also I love the sweat and grittiness of this shot. The blurs on the left side add to this feel. Also awesome: the ref watching passively from the corner of the frame, like a Roman Emperor witnessing a gladiator battle. (This caption was too long, (and sort of pretentious now that i re-read it.))

So I like Parros because he is a great enforcer and by all accounts nicest guy ever off the ice. But I just found out today he is was recently ranked the fourth smartest pro athlete in North America by the Sporting News.

This article is already becoming way too much of a Parros fan zine, so I won't go into the any details on Parros' genius-ness, but you can read more about Parros being both harder and smarter than you on in Sporting News's terribly formatted article.

Footnote(s)
*Scott's younger brother is Rob Niedermayer. Rob has had a shitty last couple of years, getting traded around the league and playing 3 games this season with his (admittedly complicated) name misspelled on his own jersey.  But hopefully things are on the upswing for him. Rob currently is gearing up for a leadership role with the Buffalo Sabres for their playoff run. He is the only member of the team to have already won a Stanley Cup, and the Sabres are hoping he can provide a level head and insight for a city which has never had a championship season for either of its major league sports teams. (Though the Buffalo Bills do have the dubious distinction of being the NFL team to loose the most Superbowls in the 1990's. (I say this as a fan.))

**Selleck had one of my favorite skits as part of Conan O'Brien's long running bit "Celebrity Secrets."  I can't find Selleck's skit anywhere on the internet, so you can consider this transcript of Selleck's dialogue from this Conan bit from 10 years an StrictlyCommercials exclusive.

Most blogs try to get exclusives where they are the first to know about things. I prefer to have exclusive content by being the last to remember the details about something stupid. Here is a different one of Conan's "Celebrity Secrets" sketches so you can see the format. Then join me after the video for the dialogue from Selleck's skit.



Selleck's take on this went as follows:

Tom Selleck: When I received the script to the film Three Men and a Little Lady I signed up for the film immediately. For one reason: I never learned how to read.

Here are few more bonus clips of that skit from Conan, because it makes me entirely too happy:

Patrick Stewart:

(There was a video of Patrick Stewart here, but I couldn't find a version that wouldn't autoplay as soon as you arrived at my website. This was confusing and annoying, So I've taken it out. However, I still think it is a funny video, so when you are ready to watch it and have it auto play CLICK THESE WORDS RIGHT HERE and you will go to the site I found it on.)

I missed you while you are on that other site. Promise you will never leave again?

I have no idea what language those captions at the bottom are in, but they kind of fit the basement setting. It makes it look like Stewart was interrogated by the Soviets and then his responses were translated for the Stasi. Or since the number of umlauts and vowels in the captions make them look much more like some kind of parody of a Scandinavian language instead of German, perhaps the captions are written specifically for the Swedish Chef.

John Tesh:



I love the "T.E.S.H." acronym joke. It didn't get a big laugh from the audience, but I still remember that joke from when I first saw that sketch eight or so odd years ago. Maybe all that proves is that I have terrible taste in humor. This blog would be evidence towards that.

Clint Eastwood D.A.R.E.s you.

I was not surprised to learn Clint Eastwood did an PSA about not smoking crack rocks in the 1980's. Eastwood was the biggest film star of much of 80's* and has one of the most intimidating presences of any person who is not Darth Vader. Here is his ad:

The ad is melodramatic, and the slogan "the thrill that can kill" at the end is pretty groan inducing, but its hard to not take the message seriously coming from Dirty Harry. This is an actor who appeared in the film The Gauntlet, a film so hardcore that it features a four minute sequence of a house being shot at by half of the cops in Arizona until it made of more bullet holes than house collapses.

Eastwood makes you take this ad seriously. He gives the camera the same look he gave to the wall of that bank in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. And in that film, that look was immediately followed by him blowing up the wall using a gun that it looks like he stole from Navarone:

For comparison here is that exact same ad with the dialogue delivered by a less badass 80's celebrity:

While it is admirable that Paul  Reubens wanted kids to not do crack, and it even makes sense for him to appear in a PSA since Pee Wee Herman was really popular with kids of the era, it is impossible to take this damn ad seriously.

I guess the producers had Reubens do the ad in character because they were worried kids wouldn't recognize  Reubens out of costume, and to be fair he does look a lot different not dressed like Pee Wee,:

but it is still probably a bad idea to try to have a character tell you not to do drugs who is best known for hanging out with a talking chair.

Not that "Pee Wee's Playhouse" was on the same level of obviously drugged-out-ness of say, H.R. Puffinstuff, but he is definitely not a guy who you can take seriously. I'll cut to the chase, I'm only mentioning H.R. Puffinstuff as an excuse to post Mr. Show's awesome parody of that show:

Bottom line America**: when Clint Eastwood tells you something. you take him seriously. I will now end this the only way one can any anything Eastwood related:

Footnote(s):
*According to the author in a late 80's Rolling Stone interview with Eastwood which I don't feel like trying to look up.
**To steal the catch phrase from Conan's "Pierre Brenard's Recliner of Rage" Skit

Conan Advertising News Part 2000

The domain name hornymanatee.com is owned by NBC.

Really. Trying going to it. Conan said it on air as an ad lib and NBC bought it to make sure they weren't retroactively advertising something obscene.

So Conan may have been fired and NBC took down all videos ever of him, but he will live on anytime anyone accesses the NBC main site by typing in Hornymanatee.com
Conan. I salute you.




Also this week in Conan advertising news: Team Coco had two really clever forms of non-traditional promotion this week that I thought I should address:

1. A god damned actual blimp that is flying around the country. with a website you can track it on here. (My favorite part of the site, is that at night when the blimp is docked at the airport the status updates to "The Blimp is sleeping." This makes me visualize a bunch of little blimps covered in blankets snoring side by side like the baby elephants in dumbo.

2. A live feed of the production offices for 24 hours straight which included puppets announcing the guest lineup for Conan's first week of shows, along with a contest to vote for who his first guest should be (below)



The 24 hour live feed's final minutes were what appears to be footage from the hotel lobby at 2:00 Am during a Furries convention:

(I didn't post the actual video because it's minutes of everyone dancing while the guy dressed as a taco yells "Go Taco!" which gets old exactly as quickly as you would imagine.)

You can read the official hour by hour recap here.




Speaking of Advertising and Conan, I have been trying to find one of my favorite ever fake ads. Its an old Conan from back when the used to get preempted by the NBA on NBC and end up being on at 3am or some such nonsense.

Since they tape the same day and knew when this was going to happen, they started a segment called, "No one's watching," which made fun of the fact that they could do anything they wanted. These included appearances by the always controversial masturbating bear and jokes about how so few people where watching the show they couldn't even get anyone to buy advertising timeslots.

Below is one of the fake ads that Conan said was from the biggest sponser they could get for that evening. Unfortunately whoever loaded it chopped off the punchline so i will have to describe it to you after the video.



After the guy falls down the title card for the name and address of the store comes up and is read by the announcer. It read as follows:

Shoes!

Down by the street next to the big building.

But what really sells the gag is the voice of the Conan staffers they had read it. It uses the same two unlike voices reading a small amount of text gag employed by Conan's Secrets* videos. The guy who says "Down by the street next to the big building" mumbles it to the point of incoherence. Conan, It will be good when you are back. Glad I have Craig and Colbert and Stewart to keep me warm at night till then.**

Footnote(s)

*What was that sketch? vola:

**That got creepy at the end there.

One Last Thing About Movie Trailers

I have been finding I enjoy a lot of big summer tent-pole movies more in trailer form than I enjoy them in actual movie form. Partly I'm sure this is because big action movies are on average getting lazier and worse. But this will happen to me even with movies I like. Where I see it and like it but liked it better as a two minute short film of explosions and catch chases. I guess the problem is that for big budget action movies, you often times are only seeing them for the cool set pieces, and maybe a few snappy lines of dialogue. Since a really well cut trailer can provide you with a perfect distillation of little bits of every action sequence, the rest of the movie kind of seems extraneous by comparison.

I realize this kinda goes against everything cinema as an art from stands for, but since most summer movie explode-athons contain very little artistic or cinematic in them anyway, I stand by my opinion.

Though its always a bad sign of I have the same opinion as a satirical segment from Stephen Colbert from the Daily Show in 2002.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Trailer Hitch
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Actually, after watching that again. I agree with most of those jokes as valid opinions.

Footnote(s)

I just wanted to use this space to thank comedy central for having every single second of the John Stewart and Colbert accessible online. I was trying to find a great clip of Ian McShane on Conan to use in my previous post, only to have what was supposed to be the video, instead be an error message from NBC's portion of Hulu stating, "This video is not longer available we suggest you enjoy these related clips instead." All four of the related clips, where, I kid you not clips from Leno's 2010 version of The Tonight Show. This selection was probably determined by a computer program, but I kinda think NBC is just trying to convince people that Conan never had a TV show. I assume if they could, NBC would send the T-1000 back in time to 1962 to kill  Ruth Reardon before Conan is born.

Yay! Here is an Ad for Strippers!

This ad is much funnier if you don't know what product it is gonna be for when you start watching it. So I put it into tube chop since Youtube lists the title of videos at the top when you embed them. This is probably a little excessive but I figured if I'm gonna post this I might spend the extra minute so you can get the full effect.



As I am inclined to do when I want to discuss an ad without spoiling it. Here is a Bruma Shave ad to act as a buffer:

Join


Our happy


Brushless throng


Six million users


Can't be wrong

This is a cute promo, but obviously the reason it works so well if because the string dance has this element of recent history nostalgia attached to it. Conan went off the air on January 22nd, and with today being September 22nd, this means that sometime next week conan will have been off the air longer than he was host of the Tonight Show.  Admittedly 7 months isn't that long a time, but Conan after getting fired cause of dick moves by NBC and Leno, I really don't think its an exaggeration to say he has become a folk hero for folks under 30. Here is another ad that uses the same song and concept to promote Conan (the proletariat's late night host).



I don't have much to add in terms of Analyzing the above ad, its a clever concept and I like the angles they chose for the shots. Instead I'm gonna talk about the awesome beard conan has been rocking in the print ads and viral videos for the new show, because, well, beards are cool. (My concept of the criterion of cool is the original Brawny Paper Towel man.)

I hope he keeps the beard, or at least has it for the first episode and has Tom Selleck come and shave it down to a mustache for him on camera. I wrote that previous sentence hoping that I could follow it with a great old clip of Tom Selleck shaving off half of his mustache on "Late Night" but apparently that clip does not exist on the internet. I did find a random news article about it though so I proof I didn't dream this event.

So instead I with some Late Night clips, because I ended my last post with one and that post didn't even have anything to do with Conan.



I Can't find this one with the intro for some reason but here is a clip from when Conan used do a bit where they would pretend to use the NBC satellite dish to watch obscure TV channels. This clip is what was on the "Men Without Hats conversation Channel"



I probably could and should just stop after posting two reasonable length clips here, but instead I'm going to post the funniest 20 minutes ever to be on television. Here is Norm MacDonald on Conan from back in the 90's. (a 20 minute clip of Late Night with Conan O'Brien is the kind of cutting edge entertainment you won't find on other blogs about advertisements.)







Footnote(s):
First video found via WarmingGlow

Burma Shave ad text from the awesome Burma-Shave.org

Gas pedals on Dutch built cars can only be operated safely whilst wearing wooden shoes

I went to the New York auto show a few weeks back, and realized that many of the promotional displays were cool enough, or ridiculous enough to merit a blog post or two or three depending on how excited I get.

This picture is of part of the Volvo display. This foolishness is what inspired me to start taking pictures to do a post about the displays. The slogan was “Scandinavian design inspired”, which combined with the shelving and random wooden decorative objects makes me think Volvo is trying to sell cars by comparing them selves to Ikea. Maybe to the ad guys who created the phrase “Scandinavian design," this means their cars are like some awesome well made Scandinavian product that is popular throughout Europe which I'm unfamiliar with, or maybe they are saying this car is as well crafted as something else Scandinavian like the band ABBA, or the Swedish bikikni team, or award winning actor and full time handsome person Stellan Skarsgard.

But all I think of when I see shelving units and the phrase Scandinavian craftsmanship is Ikea. Which just makes me think of furniture that comes in a box the size of an Uno card, which consists of 2000 screws and is supposed to be assembled with one thin little alan wrench made of a light blub filament. This really is not the image marketers should try to bring to the forefront of a car buyers mind. Unless they are selling kits from which you can assemble one of those custom full size wooden cars, which are awesome.

Volvo's Scandinavian brethren, Saab, who as a former asset of the now federally owned General Motors has gone from being on the brink of being disbanded completely, to being almost bought by tiny Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg in the summer of 2009, a deal which fell through when it was revealed no one, anywhere had ever bought a car from Koenigsegg, and that company just consisted of just one guy. So Saab was back to as state impending doom for the rest of 2009 until they were bought (for real this time) in February 2010 by an other tiny supercar company, the Dutch company Spyker, which has made and sold even fewer cars than the zero Koenigsegg had sold.

I figured since Saab is technically right now not owned by anyone, since the ink is still drying on the Spyker deal and Spyker is busy getting sued by the Saab Aerospace company, I assumed Saab's current Hospice nurse GM would not pony up much dough for a display. Surprisingly Saab had a welcoming display with high production values. A few other automakers had furniture in their areas to encourage guests to stay longer. But the rest of the furniture at the show at the show were all very modern and uncomfortable bench style apparati integrated into the walls of the display. Saab actually sprang for comfy padded chairs, and consequently had the only seating I saw anyone actually sit in the whole show.

Pictured above: a couple discussing how the would never buy a Saab in a million years because Saabs are Dorkmobiles, but also discussing how the appreciate Saab providing them with very nice chairs to relax in before they stand up again to go look at cars they actually like.

(actually I do like the rear styling on whatever model Saab is in foreground of the picture.)

Well that brings us to the end of the Swedish portion of the New York auto show, so I think that this is a good time to break. More on the auto show when I think of things to say about the other pictures I have.

I'll leave you with the musical stylings of the greatest Scandinavian band ever. In fact I would go so far as to say these guys are the best thing to come out of Norway since Berserker Vikings. Here is Hurra Torpedo covering Bonnie Taylor's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" using an chest freezer and a couple of stoves and steel girder as their rhythm section.

(Thanks to T. Cunnion for showing me the Hurra Torpedo clip 4 years ago.)

BONUS Stellan Skarsgard fact: Actors Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly named their child Stellan after Mr. Skarsgard. Bettany said in an interview on Conan O'Brien that he wanted their child to be named Stellan not just because Skarsgard is a good friend of theirs, but also because Skarsgard has the highest alcohol tolerance of any person Bettany has ever met, and he was hoping the name would help pass along this trait.