The worse commercial, EVER MADE, PERIOD has got to be the “Eagleman” Car Insurance commercial they show in the Chicagoland area. If you’ve never seen it, count yourself as fortunate. If you live in or near Chicago, I’m sure you’re feeling me on this!
Allow me to summarize: Two dumb looking bimbos driving in a car Loud thump Car screeches to a halt.
Bimbo#1: “Do you have insurance on this car?”
Bimbo#2: “Noooo…”
Bimbo#1: “Then it must be… the Eagleman!” Bimbos step out of the car Man in a rediculous eagle suit is standing on top of the car
Eagleman: “IIII have something for YOUUUU” Eagleman squats sproing! Large egg appears Little baby eagle pops out of the egg, hold in its beak a paper with insurance rates
Bimbos in slow, dumb unision: “Woooooooow…
Look at those lowwww raaaaates!”
GAAAAAH!!!
Ah, Eagleman. We taped this once in college during an episode of the simpsons. Then we took the audio track and played it during a party. A whole houseful of people screamed every line, including the egg-laying sound which you so aptly expressed. I wish everyone in the country could see that commercial.
So many levels: Technical brilliance, gender confusion, sexual stereotypes, anthropomorphism. I prefer to think that “Eagleman” was one of Kubrick’s early, uncredited works.
I think the creepy little girls from the Welch’s and Pepsi ads are candidates for a celebrity death match. I wonder if we could get Nick Parks to do the claymation.
There is an Etrade ad with a young gigolo cringing as he rubs his aged benefactor’s bunions. I think the tagline is “be your on sugar daddy.”
I hate all ads for diamonds, since I think diamonds are LAME. If a guy ever bought me one I’d make him take it back and give me the cash. What bigger waste of money is there than a diamond? Shit if you like the way they LOOK get a cubic zirconia. They’re PRETTIER. If you just like the fact that you’re wearing something enormously expensive, then you’re a shallow idiot and you need to be shot anyway.
I recently saw a commercial that actually made me laugh. It was bad, but in a sort of good way…like “I can’t believe they did that”… plus it reminded me of Mark Serlin.
it was for “Candies” fragrances for men and woman… you see this woman in a bedroom hosing herself down practically… just spraying and spraying… she’s in just undies and a bra and rolling around on the bed like she’s having serious cramps or something… and the guy is in the bathroom … he is sifting through all these condoms in the cabinet til he finds his Candies cologne… then he pulls his underwear waistband away from his stomach and sprays some down there, then grabs a condom and goes into the bedroom where the woman has finally calmed down (or the overkill of scent made her pass out) and she is lying upside down on the bed.
Ooh, Eagleman. They have a new one out where Eagleman squats and fires and egg out his butt, nearly knocking over some guy in a chair. God those are so bad.
I only saw this once a number of months ago, but some burger chain had a funny knockoff of those. It was in the exact style of the DeBeers adds, with a man and a woman in shadow figures, set to the same type of music that builds up and up. Obviously very much in love, their arms intertwine, and instead of opening up a jewelry box to reveal the glittering diamond, they produce hamburgers and feed them to each other.
I can’t think where I saw this… it had to have been one of the animated Fox shows (maybe Futurama). It was a takeoff on the deBeers commercials; it had the shadows and the diamond, and then the long-haired shadow sort of sank down out of the shot while the other one stayed where it was, and the tag line was something like “deBeers. She’ll pretty much have to.”
The Tampax commercials are… disturbing, yes. I’m sure they’re true, but I’d really rather not think about it. Of course, I’m hardly their target market.
The Corbet Canyon ads are annoying. I haven’t heard one in a while, but Mattress Discounter ads had an entirely too cheery woman singing about the things you can do on a mattress. But they both pale in comparison to a local termite company the name of which I still don’t know, because their ads were SUNG. Sort of. I say “sort of” because they didn’t rhyme (except sort of incidentally) and didn’t really have any meter, they just had an entire chorus braying a bunch of words in unison. It may have been Ecola. Or Ecolab. Or Ricola. It was impossible to tell from the song. “(Mumble), deadly to terMITEs, the safest way to FIGHT (mumble) services the (different mumble) terMITEs. (Mumble) ser-vis-izzzzz.”
Oh, and DEFINITELY any radio commercial which features sirens, horns, or squealing brakes… there should be mandatory prison sentences for anyone involved in any way with broadcasting one of those.
Torq, that was “Family Guy”, and I was just getting ready to mention it. I nearly pissed myself over that one.
Madpoet, I hear ya on the smug women and clueless guys. My current favorite is the one for Ready-to-Eat Campbell’s Tomato Soup: “Campbell’s must have been thinking of my guys when they made this new soup. You see, everyone in my house with a Y-chromosome is an incompetent boob, and now that Campbell’s has eliminated the outrageous step of Adding A Can Of Water from the process of making tomato soup, they are no longer totally dependent on me for their sustenance! Thanks, Campbell’s!”
I agree, both the Welch’s Grape Juice girl and the Pepsi Girl commercials will be playing 24/7 in hell.
I can’t believe no one’s mentioned the “Dodge: Different” campaign. Huh? Why are you trying to sell hillbilly trucks like computers or something? This, I’m sure, goes right over the heads of the target audience and makes the rest of us laugh hystericly.
Some of the Sprint PCS ones are funny, but mostly on the radio…there’s one where he’s talking to a guy who’s used to talking on a regular cellphone and he keeps going “are you still there?” like every 5 seconds and the PCS guy says VERY PATIENTLY “Yes, I’m still here.”
I hate that KBLAB lady!!! If I worked in an office with her, I’d kick her ass in the parking lot…especially for making me listen to that crap radio station!
You people are lucky you don’t have to deal with Rodney D. Young Insurance… ABIA Insurance… Watson’s Pools… Sunflower and Hap Hazard… but the worst is DEFINATELY the Midtown Chiropractic.
Fat black kid, approx 9 yells at the end:
“Free ride, IF YA NEED IT!!!”
Ugh.
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
Frankly, I find those new C-NET ads annoying. If you hadn’t seen one yet, it begins with some mope wearing a t-shirt marked “YOU”. Then another person, wearing a t-shirt with the C-NET logo on it, enters the room. The C-NET guy leads the YOU person to another guy, this one wearing a shirt saying “The right computer for you.” They then hold hands and stare at the camera, a vacuous smile on their lips. Tacky and cheap, to say the least. Honestly, if you’re paying $5000 for a half-minute of TV time, couldn’t you afford to do better than that?
Homer: I remember the Rodney D. Young insurance commercials! Is Boots Williams still doing those inane commercials “at that swingin’ Red Bridge exit”? When I was a kid, I thought it was meant literally… that there was a red suspension bridge there.
You’re probably too young to remember these, but in the mid-80s there was a spokesman for one of the car dealerships in St. Joseph who was a speech professor at the college there (briefly; I think he was “let go”). He exaggerated the enunciation so much that it sounded like he was choking, or at least spitting. “Guhreguh Buhyuickkk, on the Beltuh at Becchhkkkk.”
I’m surprised no one mentioned this song, popular in the schoolyard I grew up in:
Do your balls hang low?
Do they wobble to-and-fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?
Can you throw’em over your shoulder
Like a continental soldier?
Do you balls…hang…low?
Narrator: During a recent stay at the hospital after quadruple-bypass surgery, Dave discovered something different!
Dave: Hey! What is this???
Nurse: It’s healthy food, Dave.
Dave: This would be great with a pound or two of fat slathered over it!
Narrator: Introducing the new Wendy’s Triple-Cheese, Mayo Dressing Healthburger…
They should get the guy on the Gold Bond Powder commercials, who “gets the male itch” to do the tampon ads and have the women from the tampon ads doing the Gold Bond ads…
But before we do this, the Old Navy ads must be stopped. Throw the Old Biddy, the Barbara Eden impersonator and whoever else comes to mind in the trundle. Plow the set with salt. Put the dog with a foster family; don’t tell them where (s)he came from (is performance fleece the name of their marketing strategy?)
Christ! Now I’ve got that fuckin’ grapejuice freak permanently tattooed to my brain. No kiddin’, I’m afraid of her! That’s the stuff nightmares are made of! Her teeth are kind of rounded. You know what I mean? Like, usually people with rounded teeth are crazy or only live in the cartoon world. Shit! She’s still there. I’m losin’ it.
