With this commercial, 30 Seconds of Hell kick-starts our continuing “Tall as a Damn Mountain” series, wherein we cull commercials with the tallest people in all the land.
Part one of our series features another clever commercial from ESPN’s Sportscenter. This commercial features former-NBA Allstar, Gheorghe Muresan, a 7′ 7” center who played for the Washington Bullets in the ’90s. He is really tall. Gheorghe is such an erudite — a damn tall erudite — that he starred in My Giant (1998) with co-star, Billy Crystal.
In a white-collar office setting, we observe colossal hulking Gheorghe Muresan as dances. This may sound like a TALL TALE; however, this did happen, this really happened, in real life, this is not a tall tale, it’s tall entertainment, a tall pleasure every dance-step of the way.
I like to think of the creative board meetings, the pre-productions phases of this project that prefaced. I imagine the creative team being like, “Hey, what we got, whose got a pitch, hurry up, I’m not listening.” Soon after, someone meek stands up and says, “I colored-penciled storyboards with Gheorghe Muresan dancing in the office.” The creative director, whilst smoking a cigar, turns and says, “Colored pencil? Oh brother, not more colored pencils. Kid, are you shitting me?” The meek man replies, “24 piece Crayola. Sharpened as a Native American arrow head.” The cigar-ed boss replies, “Kid, you’re promoted, I’m so sick of all these schmucks drawing with those garbage brands Rose Art and Color Busters.” Cigar boss turns to Belinda, the secretary, “Get Gheorghe Muresan’s agent on the phone, pronto, or YOU’RE FIRED.”
Before I wrote this digressing review, I thought of transcribing the entire commercial — then I realized that would be a waste of time, for I’m watching CNBC right now, and American Greed is on. My point is this: take your money out of banks and stuff it under your mattress, pay attention to the simple dialogue in this commercial, and enjoy yourself whilst Gheorghe Muresan dances.
After writing this, I now realize that most of Gheorghe’s fame and success in the public eye has focused only on his height, and despite the title of this post, this post is about the joy Gheorghe spreads. It’s not all about his height, it’s about what’s inside of his tall body, and inside of his tall body is a big, warm heart.
Rating: 30 Seconds of Heaven
Sky-tops Gheorghe Muresan greets us at the door with a sky-high welcome
“Credit card, you got it.” — Macaulay Culkin, as Kevin, in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992).
Credit card, you got it. Credit Cards: can’t live with ‘em and you can’t shoot ‘em. Card Credits: our nation is in debt. Dear credit cards, in the 1990s, you bought so many damn speed boats and jet-skis for people, and someday you will be burned at the stake like a witch, and hanged, like Bernie Madoff, in town square.
Discover Card, on the other hand, seems to be the ‘indie’ credit card (does urban outfitters have a credit card special savings signup? Umm, don’t know, don’t care) and this commercial with the faux hair band is pretty clever.
The commercial runs like a VH1 Behind the Music documentary, a show I have always admired, and it certainly packs a punch within its 30 seconds. This commercial is effective, and glory glory hallelujah, it’s watchable.
We hear the band’s story, starting from the glory-days — lil red corvette, cover of Rolling Stone, giant credit card, jacuzzi-limo — and travel in time, to the future, with our 30 Seconds of Hell helicopter landing on the inevitable 30 Seconds of Hell helicopter landing pad, where we exit the helicopter, and walk to an ending where one of the dudes from Danger Kitty works a hot dog stand.
The commercial is much like the teachings of an Aesop Fable, teaching us: be frugal with your money and stop buying jacuzzi-tubs, plush spa robes, summer homes in Maine, and a three-fleet of shreddin’ jet-skis, colored hot green, electric pink, and outrageous orange, respectively.
Their slogan is clever: “For the slightly smarter consumer.” Here we have a credit card company telling the consumer to, and I am paraphrasing, ‘cool your jets on the spending.’
This commercial is both funny and scary to me. This bug speaks with a calm, creepy baritone voice that reminds me of the killer from “No Country for Old Men.” You know he really wants to do more than use your phone, but you can’t help but be caught off guard by his compliment of your beautiful oak floors. Do you let him in?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this ad from 1982 was aired right around that time that AIDS (the disease) was becoming a global crisis. I’m not sure how they didn’t see this as the “worst possible name for a diet pill,” at the time. That’s like naming a tobacco product canzer.
Okay, I think we all agree that these commercials for The General auto insurance are ugly. Distractingly ugly. The General himself has a rasping voice, is three-feet-tall, has a wilting white mustache, and wears his helmet so low that you cannot see his eyes. He seems like a stereotypical general, but what are the origins of this zany stereotype?
The best part of this spot is the CGI sky diving. If this was live-action sky-diving, this 30 second spot might receive a 30 Seconds of Heaven rating, but it’s CGI, everything in this campaign is CGI, and The General drives a hummer.
Why would anyone trust a company with commercial like this?
By the way, I was looking for the general commercial where the general delivers the proof-of-insurance in a pizza box, but to no avail.
Wieden + Kennedy. This campaign has been running since the Fax-Machine Era. It’s still funny most of the time. Wally should have received an EMMY or a 30 Seconds of Hell Awardy Award for his acting here. Disappointed, dejected, heartbroken. We’ve been there, pal. And, fuck the Yankees and the Red Sox.
“I’m going to get my hands on your data.” Chck, plicka, keyboard-chck chk, blk chica chica. Whence that onomatopoeia? One word: yourkompacpresariokomputerkeyboard or wordprocessor unit from the early ’90s. “I’m going to get into your system.”
Once upon a time beofore the monumental cgi of the awe-inspiring film Titanic, a movie that made me cry in the 5th grade, Leonardo Decaprio gave an honest effort to inform ambivilant white-collared workers of the importance of computer safety. Soon after, James Cameron, mastermind director of Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 : Judgement Day (1994), had a dangerous run-in with a flanneled computer hacker (marrymeleo!!!). Honestly, this problem stemmed from the fact that Cameron named his password ‘corvette,’ due to the fact that 99.99% of the time he was day-dreamin’ of riding in a candy-apple corvette. He would wake up in the morning: candy apple corvette. Before nighty-night: candy apple corvette.
29 seconds in, we hear an insightful testimony from an insightful asian man whom tells us, “someone got my password (much like Camron, the password was [little-red] corvette, a password derived from the subconscious of our world).” “Soon after, some flanneled dude [sic] has the audacity to walk in with a yellow toolbox and ask my smoking-hot red-blazered sexy-secretary [sic] something stupid, but smart.” The secrety confirms this occurrence: “He had a special toolbox.”
This public service announcement spurred an epiphany within meee-self: every night, I see strangers digging through my dumpster — now I know they are looking for my top secret 4″ floppy discs. Those are those plastic things capable of storin’ 7.11kb of data, and sometimes I even store my MS paint artwork on there — my illustrations of important things. No worries, though. I can turn back time. Yeah, baby, belly that.
“Usually when you think hackers, you think [super] computers, and the data stored in those computers.” adds an unknown but authoritative guy, “sometimes the hackers try to get the data in our heads.”
The truth is out there.
2:20 in, a wild sighting of Delaney Driscoll, a supporting actress that starred in Alexander Payne’s Election (1999). Wow, is this really true?
The following still-image sequence features impeccable use of the diagonal yellow-to-blue graphic gradient. This gradient was created in MS-Paint, version 2.0. This is teamed with impeccable use of beveled borders on the title captions.
So team, what have we learned? Many things, one being the importance of cause-and-effect. Be safe with your computer passwords and floppy discs; that, and take your time, everything is perfectly fine, and have fun whilst at work. Both men and women at work.
You took too much, man, you took too much, too much. There is a song that sums up this review:
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Dear diary, hi again, this is your friend Bi-Bi, and after my daddy bought me baby rollerblade we went to Tahiti, and Bi-Bi and baby rollerblade went rollerblading with mommy. When did many super-fun things.
(1) Went rollerblading. check √
(2) Drank fruit punch. check √
(3) Bi-Bi played with rollerblade baby. check √
(4) Daddy bought Bi-Bi a new doggie. check √
(5) Bi-Bi eat ice cream. check √
(6) Bi-Bi spend money. check √
(7) Bi-Bi throw a hissy when mommy fight with daddy. check √
(8) Bi-Bi throw frisbee with rollerblade baby. check √
(9) Bi-Bi get hungry and go pee-pee. check √
(10) Doggie go pee-pee in hotel room a me hidey. check √
(11) Mommy and daddy take Bi-Bi and rollerblade baby to believe-it-or-not museum owned by Ripley’s. check √
Hi, I’m here to talk to you about money. Look at me — I’m walking around a beautfiul desert landscape, talking about making money, and tell you that, “the American dream is gone and it ain’t coming back.” During shooting breaks, the production team drank fruit punch and ate edible panties — over 10 boxes of edible panties —boy, our dogs were tired after that day of shooting.
Luckily, we had some nice and dandy unpaid commerical actors providing testimonies regarding our unscucessful scheme program that since has folded. Footage of these unpaid commerical actors gave us something to cut away to, because I (i’m in the cowboy hat) cut my shooting schedule short — frankly, I ate too many gosh darn edible panties. Then our unpaid production assistants and our unpaid interns ran to the store to buy more edibile panties. What were they thinking? More edible panties? Those damn unpaid interns and production assistants should know better; they know I can’t stop eating edible panties.
Get a load of this: after production ended, my unpaid producer hauls in this box filled with receipts to me, receipts from the unpaid interns and production assistants, askin’ I be reimbersin’ for their takin’ kindly to my edible panty-fixin’-hankerin’. Now I’m a straight shooter and I tell ‘em how it tis: “You’re unpaid! Christ, you knew you’re going to be unpaid at the darn time you signed your unpaid contract. Were you expecting a for-hire opportunity after production? Don’t make me laugh. Christ, I ain’t ‘embersing you for the edible panties. I don’t care what you do on your tax returns. Cook the books or something. Write it off as a gift! Leave me alone, I want to play with my toys in my office.”
Wow-wee. Production was something else. My dogs were killin’ after production.
Well, holy hell. If there’s one thing the teabagging masses love it’s people dressed in colonial garb. If there’s another thing, it’s furries dressed in colonial garb. Rick Barber is flirting with Tea Party perfection here, especially since he’s ignoring some rather notable historical facts. He almost seems like he’s doing it on purpose.
He appeals to Washington as the owner of a distillery who “knows how tough it is to run a small business without a tyrannical government on your back.” But President Washington presided over, and approved, the first tax levied by the federal government — the 1791 whiskey tax. When the tax met resistance, he approved the assembling of militias to enforce the law and mobilization of agents to collect the revenue. So the Barber daydream of Washington angrily ordering a “gathering of armies” to oppose a tax is… well, entertaining, I guess
Anyway, with Tim James and Dale Peterson inexplicably losing their primaries, this Rick Barber J-hole will be supplying more than his share of idiot theatrics for the rest of the cycle.
I’ve been giving Chrysler a lot of shit lately so I’ve been trying to find a new ad of theirs that I don’t dislike. Well here it is. I googled for about 20 seconds and couldn’t find the company that produced this spot. Whoever it is, it is obvious they’ve been keeping their eyes on A Continuous Lean
It is interesting however, that Chrysler waited until they were disowned by the Germans and adopted by the Italians to get all jingoistic.
Rating: Thirty Seconds of Heaven
What can we say about this “new classic” that hasn’t already been said? The weird thing is that it does actually give me the willies toward the end. Real, genuine goosebumps and not goosebumps in name only. (GINOs)
This commercial is low fidelity — no excuses — this kid is speaking martian.
Some say, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, that Nerf was a government subsidiary with a mission to mint condition the minds of children for an oncoming intergalactic war with “unknown and unseen ‘invaders.’”
After many botched theories, the U.S. Government concluded that Nerf Corporation would move forward by, “just selling toys, packaged in radical and booger-ish boxes, with GPS tracking chips implanted”; notwithstanding, this video speaks martian, in plain broken english.
Like, um, like, somebody call the dork police, and the fashion police, because this spot is so totally 30 seconds of dork-alert-5000.
This commercial is a recipe for a dork-disaster: 1) the commercial is driven by a kids’ bop rendition of the “Bly Gotta Feelin’ kick-start-party-song by the Black Eyed Peas. 2) the opening line of the song is, “Didn’t know, couldn’t see, what was around the corner for me. Let’s go!” 3) the kids bop vocalist is dressed in autotune, and this is a textbook example of a creative team shamelessly jumping on the ephemeral autotune bandwagon.
4) The commercial flagrantly targets caricatured demographics — only those who can afford a weber, of course — which, in this case, is the widowed, prim and proper, affluent grey panther; the wholesome African-American male who lives in the suburbs and is happy; the lonesome librarian who lives by herself and has fun by herself; and the jolly bearded gas station attendant (he’s the lil shocker). This blogger will omit the rest of the dorks, because I respect you, and because this dork-ball video-mash subsequently welters into an unsightly meatball — hot and ready to be charred on the ole’ web grill.
However, I do appreciate the female backing vocals, 0:26 in, when we hear a passionate, “Come on — yeah!”
Rating:30 Seconds of hot-and-ready propane gasy hell
Here’s a fun one. This Willie Horton ad is a classic. Notice how the words “Kidnapping”, “Stabbing”, and “Raping” appear on the screen. Michael Dukakis personally let Willie out of his cell. Willie kept saying “Mike, I cannot wait to get out of this jail cell so that I can commence with the rapin’” and Dukakis was like, “Hold your horses, we’ll get you out on the streets in no time. God George HW Bush would totally kick my ass if he knew I was doing this, haw haw, gimme some more blow (COCAINE), haw, haw.”
The ad played a significant role in getting Bush elected. Dukakis is the president of his cell block in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And that is why we won the first Gulf War so decisively. And then Ross Perot.
Rating: Thirty Seconds of Heaven
Part one of our series features another clever commercial from ESPN’s Sportscenter. This commercial features former-NBA Allstar, Gheorghe Muresan, a 7′ 7” center who played for the Washington Bullets in the ’90s. He is really tall. Gheorghe is such an erudite — a damn tall erudite — that he starred in My Giant (1998) with co-star, Billy Crystal.
