The only thing I can think of is that some parents get freaked out about chicken pox, thinking their kid is going to die, and so they don’t go to the doctor out of fear. This actually does happen with other diseases (breast cancer comes to mind).
Or maybe they figure that no one thinks chicken pox kills, so they backhandedly tell people that.
Or maybe they’re just insane.
Another vote for that damn singing navel commercial.
I’m also a little freaked out by the Charmin commercial featuring a bear …doing… his business in the woods. It’s just weird.
Where can I find that singing belly-button commercial?
Oh my God! Saw that commercial last night and it is just so weird! Especially that little moment of “success” where the little wavvy lines emminate from the bear’s head!
Here in the UK not long ago there was an ad giving advice (they used to call them Public Information Films) about preventing heart attacks, following a healthy diet and taking exercise, and so on.
This one features a huge disembodied beer-gut bouncing along the landscape, much like the big white spheres which used to come inshore in the cult series The Prisoner, if anyone remembers that. All the while the voiceover is chanting: ‘Belly’s gonna get ya! Belly’s gonna get ya!’
Weird. Or it would have been had we not rather cruelly dedicated it to my other half’s brother!
Clare, Isle of Man.
Watching Jeremy Irons play tonsil hockey with Dominique Swain in the 1997 remake of Lolita. Hell, the subject matter of the movie is creepy enough, but to watch this display is a bit much. And then it gets worse!
Dear Dopers,
Hey I think it’s a pretty cool commercial. The snapple ones, I am crazy about them. The sex one is so cute! 
I rather like the bear toilet paper one. The one with the chicken pox scared the hell out of me. Always makes me want to cry or change the channel when I see it. 
Other things that creep me out-
[li]Anything on TV Funhouse[/li]
[li]Two stegosaurses having sex on When Dinosaurs Walked America. I loved the pan to the trees while they actually…did the dirty dingo. :)[/li]
And…that is it.
Oh gawd, yes I saw that one the other night, and got really freaked when they showed what looked like the bear rubbing his butt crack up against a giant sheet of Charmin!
It turned out it was the bear’s three-fingered paw doing the rubbing, and my sense of scale was off. But I swear the middle finger looked like his tail and the other two fingers looked like his legs!
I think it was intentional.
One more thing that freaked me out this year was that close up photo of Michael Jackson’s face. His skin was the color of paste, his eyes were totally vacant, and he had a five-o’clock shadow. He looked like a corpse. Just creepy.
While we’re on toilet paper (er…bathroom tissue) commercials…
Take a roll of tp. Make that roll of tp talk. Make that roll of tp talk about how clean it will make your nether regions and how refreshing it will be because it has ridges and valleys to grab that nasty stuff and take it away.
Creeped out yet?
Now make that roll of tp talk about the above subject matter in a British accent…
You know, it doesn’t help remove the creeped-out feeling for me, either.
What were the idiots at this ad agency thinking?
jayjay
I swear my apartment has a ghost. He plays little tricks on me. Like one day I left my pair of (bright pink) socks on the living room chair. Half hour later, I could only find one of them. I looked everywhere-under the chair, in the other room, underneith all the crap on my floor. It was nowhere to be found. I gave up, and put on another pair of socks. When I came home from work, the other pink sock was laying in the middle of the floor. There’s no way that pink sock was laying in the middle of the green carpet the whole time…He also likes to stop my CD player at the exact same point. It’s not just a skipping CD…he turns the entire thing off. It’s bizarre.
And on the subject of age-unappropriate clothing, when I was at Canobie Lake a few weeks ago, I saw a boy who couldn’t have been older than 10 wearing a shirt that said something along the lines of “Tell your girlfriend I said thanks.”
That ghost thing really creeps me out…
This one really caused problems. The offspring were watching and then the male steg starts to mount the female, and that’s when my five year old start to ask, “What are they doing?” and all I can think of is the line from the Blood House Gang song “you and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel”
But Stegosaurii are not mammals, so I don’t know, is this gratuitous or just some freaky DC producer’s personal joke Q: How do Stegosauruses make love? A: Very carefully!
So now I find myself in the middle of an explanation of where baby stegosaurs come from. Fortunately the Levi’s Singing Belly Buttons commericial comes on and breaks the tension just in time…
I realize it’s not quite in the vein of singing belly buttons, but my most recent creep out came during the recent flooding here in Houston. I think the final death count was “only” 22, and that included one woman who went to her final reward when she entered an elevator in a downtown building and rode it down into a completely submerged basement.
Surprise! You’ve got two seconds to figure it out!
In reality, she’d been advised that the basement was flooded - something I hope makes it to the surface in any liability suit - creepy nonetheless.
Chicken pox can kill if you get it during puberty. It may turn into something called Reyes (pronounced Rise) Syndrome, which is often fatal. I had chicken pox when I was 14, and I was hospitalized for one night juuuuust in case.
Furthermore, people who get it as adults often develop shingles, which is hell on earth.
That said, however, if you think your kid might die, go to the damn doctor! Go anyway, even if you don’t think they might die! What do the crying toys have to do with the price of tea in Budokhan? They can get the message across in a comprehensible PSA, one that doesn’t look like a commercial for A.I.!
~a lone cricket leg on my bathroom floor. It was near my pajamas and not attached to a body. It was very disturbing because who the hell knows where the rest of the cricket is…
~That damn Levi’s commercial everyone is talking about. When I saw it I thought I would puke. It was extremely weird. My parents think it is hilarious, but they have an odd sense of humor. I just can’t handle this commercial. It makes me want to hide.
If it’s the same ad I’m thinking of, it’s actually a Nike ad. In one version a man is being chased by the belly (which is on a motorbike) around a multi-story carpark (that’s a parking garage for the American viewers). The message at the end is “Lose the beer belly”. There’s a shorter version where the same guy is sitting at a bar and turns around to see the belly just outside the window.
Yes, they’re creepy ads – but darned funny once you get used to them.
Pfft. Singing bellybuttons? That’s nothing.
Click here to see some really disturbing anatomical crooning.
Dude. That is SO wrong. On so many levels. I know haves me the case of da heebie-jeebies
Jill could well be right about ‘Belly’s gonna get ya’ being a Nike ad. Just shows how effective advertising is on me, doesn’t it, that I could have ignored the product entirely and thought it wa something else!
Clare.
Another thing that creeps me out: being called “Jill”.
(Just kidding.:p)
Oops - sorry jr8! That must be another thing I’m not taking too much notice of lately - getting people’s names right!
Not doing very well, really, am I? Must need a beer…
Clare.