All Lost in the Supermarket

A Guaranteed Personality

So with a majority of the household having fallen ill of late (my +5 immune system renders me immune from those ailments which strike down lesser beings), the TV has been on a lot lately, and the siren song has lured me to the living room chairs on more than one occasion. It really makes me realize how much I hate bad TV, not because it's bad, but because I lack the willpower to not watch it, instead choosing to sit there and provide a running commentary on why it's so bad. Anyhow, before I allow this to become another treatise on television, I shall cut to the chase. I've been watching TV, therefore I've been watching Ads. Ads baffle me, mostly because so few of them seem to follow the rules of good advertising (listen to CBC's The Age of Persuasion if you want to learn. I'm looking at you, TV advertisers!). Sure, some of them yell the name of the product enough to make you remember it for all of 10 seconds, or some are even clever enough to stay for days and weeks. Problem with the latter is, you tend to forget what was being advertised. Below, I have a few recent Ads, with commentary

GM - Cars Gone Wild

These suck. They completely and utterly suck. They take a brand name (x_gone wild) generally associated with the sexploitation of barely-18 coeds, and apply it to....bland....cars? Not a nipple, nor a human body of any shape, age, or colour to be seen here! A proper "cars gone wild" ad campaign would be viral. It would be giant breasts painted all over that Pontiac or whatever, driven past places where dudes are known to congregate, or parked nearby. Now, lest you think I approve of this sort of tactic, I think I find it degrades both genders to various extents. What I AM saying is that it's just plain stupid to associate yourself with a sexist college-girl video brand, and then not follow that up by selling your product with the same imagery. Somehow I doubt the Japanese automakers are as intimidated as you make them out to be in that other ad of yours, GM, if you can't even be bothered to think up an effective, non-degrading ad campaign (or, for that matter, an effective, degrading ad campaign).

Wal-Mart - The Desert Island Woman

So there's a woman marooned on a desert island, and lo and behold the rescue chopper comes to her rescue. She learns that it is the spring of 2008, and declares that she will need a whole new wardrobe, which she purchases at Wal-Mart. I'm not sure if the so-called brains behind this ad realized just how appropriate it is for their business model. This woman does not know the year when she is rescued, and therefore it is safe to assume that she found means by which to survive for a significant time period. She appears thin, but given the tropical setting one assumes that seafood was available for nourishment, at the least. She appears to have built shelter, as well. This woman is free from every social contract she has ever known, she is the undisputed queen of a viable island, and while in her solitude may never satisfy her genetic desire to propagate, I'm sure that masturbation, and an appreciation of the world population problem could probably fix any issues arising therefrom. So, what we have is a truly free woman, free in every way possible for a living being to be free (except I suppose freedom of motion, but she has the whole damn island to herself, and the ocean to swim in! She can devote her mind and body to whatever goals she sees fit, she will never have to answer to anybody...but then the helicopter comes, and she flags it down, and then goes shopping, at Wal-Mart. The perversion of her natural desires is so complete that this woman can - after what we presume to be more than several months of complete isolation - return to the daily reality of consumer-driven life! I think this Ad showcases the ultimate wish of Wal-Mart, of corporations in general, and of society as a whole: The total and utter enslavement of our will to "civilization", to capitalism, and to Wal-Mart. I can't say this ad is ineffective, but it disturbs me on a profound level.

I Forget - The ad where William Shatner saves these kung-fu dudes some money

I honestly could not tell you who was advertising in this ad. I saw it at least twice, maybe three times today, and many more before that. This is probably because I don't have a team of awesome kung-fu dudes that I need to find a room for the night, but really, all I see here is a silly fight scene, and William Shatner applying his trademarked (patented? I wouldn't doubt it) slow...speaking....technique to an Oriental language, possibly Mandarin, possibly jibberish that uses oriental-like syllables, my ear is not attuned enough to know. That's all well and good, but if you honestly can't get your company name into my head after repeated viewings, even with an entertaining ad (it can be done, viz. the Motts' Clamato ad with the ninjas and the coaster-shuriken) it's what we back home like to call "EPIC FAIL!"

Although seriously, thanks for the entertainment, whoever you are.

April Fails

On that last note of failure, I didn't really have a good gag this year, and I apologize. Next year maybe I'll kill myself off and see who buys it, or announce that my good friends at BRAND X want me to tell you how good their product is, or maybe that I've decided to become a hermit, or something....maybe I'll swap URLs with another blogger I know. Seriously, I just have to do SOMETHING next year.

I'll fool you all, mark my words

-LOUD!

o/ lord I was born a ramblin' writer/speaker/thinker o/

BOOBtubeS!

I think it's more than safe to say that of all media, television is the most maligned. Forget Shakespeare's lowbrow roots, forget about the harlequin romance, the incessant repetition of this year's "hits" on 9/10 radio stations, Meet the Spartans...the pollution brought by these wretched works doesn't seem to contaminate their respective art forms the way we have allowed bad television to colour everything we see and hear on the good ol' boob tube (even though most network TV is too tame to show anything remotely resembling the actual female breast...). Videogaming is I think a close second, despite the best efforts of self-appointed moral crusaders. At least games are known to improve co-ordination and problem-solving skills. Television gets pretty much zero good press as a medium.

Which is why it's so awful that I am a sucker for good TV.

If I'm tired enough, I'm a sucker for just about any TV, but that's neither here nor there. No, I'm talking about Farscape, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica (remake), Cowboy BeBop, jPod...intelligent TV. I might as well toss in Mythbusters, Magic School Bus, Robot Chicken, Popular, Buffy, Heroes, and Dead Like Me, while I'm in a listing mood. These shows are all different, but they can be collected into groups, sometimes overlapping. You've straight-up solid writing, acting, and wit; you've got pertinent social commentary; educational value; comedy, romance, psychosis: you have art.

When you think about it, TV is the perfect mirror for society: sure, a lot of it is made with very little thought input, or a great deal of thought is put in to ensure that very little comes out, but either way, a lot of it is the bland homogeneity and routine - filler - required as if by law to stop the masses from discovering existentialism (gotta keep your power sources safely plugged in, after all). But there's always that small, rogue band of people who keep thought alive, with such alien concepts as "plot", "character", and "cinematography". I may be overly melodramatic in casting TV as some kind of socio-political battlefield, but maybe there's something to it. Television has, like Religion, been called "the opiate of the masses", after all. It would certainly explain why intelligent TV tends to get cancelled with alarming regularity: get too subversive, and the Capitalist Oppressor takes you off the airwaves. I think Heroes, Galactica and Farscape managed to hang on (although the latter was cancelled after 4 seasons) by having a strong emphasis on family, which the conservatives must like enough to make up for their boldness elsewhere. Looking deeper, I guess Heroes and Galactica both feature powerful elites making decisions that affect the fate of humanity, and they generally tend to make the right choices. The powerful elites must like that vindication.

So, with new TV comes a new cast of shows to be examined, the ones I've seen at all would be jPod (already in the list of intelligent TV, and duly cancelled), the Sarah Connor Chronicles (which I think survives on overtones of family and religion, as per my theory), and finally Eli Stone, which I'm still evaluating. On the one hand, they did do an episode where a vaccine maker was trying to hide the fact that it's products could cause Autism (dumb, 'cause that myth does not need more support: note how the vast majority of people are non-autistic and immunized? Yeah, I thought you might enjoy your health). This week, though, was much better: they totally took the US government to task for only funding the LIES of Abstinence-only "sex education"! On TV, in front of (hopefully) millions of viewers. I like their style this week, although I wonder if they mean to educate, or just to provoke a different group every week by subverting their usual message somehow? Also, the whole "Eli-as-prophet" storyline has the potential to get really, really annoying and preachy if done wrong.

I guess the bottom line is that Eli Stone has Natasha Henstridge, which should keep at least the male viewers, even in the event of severe shark-jumping.

More on this as my artistic appraisal continues. I think I may just go and watch some more Battlestar Galactica Season 3 (which you should buy or rent or borrow and watch and no they are not paying me, unless you count the part where they're making more for me to watch)

LOUD!