Like any good pop-culture whore, I watch television too much. Well, maybe too much for you, but for me, just right.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some things on television I’d rather not see. For instance, commercials. I don’t have Tivo (yes, I suffer, dear friends…I suffer), so I am forced to watch some of these inane spots over and over, wondering how they ever got made.
Lately, these are the commercials on my shit list.
Blue Bell Ice Cream “The Good Old Days”
Are we honestly supposed to believe that there was a time so good, so sweet, so countrified as the world of Blue Bell’s “good old days”? The Blue Bell commercials with the old man on the stoop gumming his vanilla bean and remembering ages past annoys the hell out of me. For instance, he recalls himself as a nervous teenage boy shyly pecking some girl on the cheek before running away, and she’s left in all her 1950s virtue, standing in the field o’ corn, her ponytail a flappin’ in the wind. I don’t care if the old man is remembering the `50s. Even back then a boy was going to try and get in your pants, not kiss you on the cheek. Frankly, if you asked the old man gumming the ice cream about his good old days, I’m guessing he’ll want to talk about the first time he made it with Suzy Sue Simmons in the fields behind the barn. Why not show that, Blue Bell?
The Suit Mart guys on the beach
Okay, so I’m sure you’re
thinking, oh no, here goes Miss Pop Rocks again, complaining about how
the ad is sexist because it shows two old men who would be lucky to get
a glance at the Early Bird special buffet down at the Sizzler cavorting
with young girls on the beach. As annoying as that is, what actually
irritates me about this ad is the fact that they are wearing suits on
the beach. If you’re going to objectify women, could you at least be
realistic about it? No one wears a three piece suit to the beach, Suit
Mart guys.
State Farm door ad
In
this ridiculous ad, a man finds a battered door in an alley and does
his very best to buff it and repair it and then paint it red. Then he
puts it in the middle of his apartment. Why? All to remind his wife
that he’s keeping a promise. “One day we’ll have our own place,” he
tells her when she arrives home to find his “gift.” Now I don’t know
about you, but if I came home to find Mr. Pop Rocks had a completely
refinished door in the middle of our living room, I’d be on the phone
to a mental health hotline with a quickness, my friends. And let’s be
honest. Mr. State Farm should’ve spent all the time he wasted
refinishing that door on a second job. Maybe then he and the honey
would finally have enough for the down payment.
Six Flags old man still hanging in there
Despite
the fact that Six Flags has recently declared bankruptcy, their creepy
old man is still hanging in there, appearing in ad after ad for the
doomed chain of theme parks. In my nightmares, creepy old Six Flags
man is running after me, clutching his drool cup, begging to take me on
a ride. I think him and the Blue Bell good-old-days guy should check
into a home and never come out.
Proactiv ads in general
I
am so tired of staring at acne all the time! We get it. It works.
But please, I do not need to see another pus-filled pustule to believe
you. Please stop showing us zits, either real zits or “imagined” zits
created by computer animation. Enough, enough, enough with the zits.
We get it. Proactiv works. Now leave us alone, please. We’re trying
to eat our dinner during this episode of Law and Order, okay?
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2009.