There’s an Alfa Romeo commercial that is bugging me. The woman doing the voiceover says, ‘You can take the Alfa out of Italy, but you can’t take Italy out of the Alfa… Romeo.’
Here’s the thing: Every time she says ‘Alfa Romeo’, she pronounces the words with a typical American/English language accent… except at the end. There, she pronounces the ‘L’ in Alfa in what is supposed to be an Italian accent. It sounds a bit like the way we learned it in high school German, where instead of putting the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth as in English, you put the tip of the tongue behind the upper teeth. (You’ll have to try it to hear the difference.) And then she tries to roll the ‘R’ in Romeo. That definitely sounds like someone hasn’t grown up rolling r’s. Sort of ‘T-t-t-tromeo’ instead of ‘R-r-romeo’.
Look: If you can do a proper accent, go for it. If you can’t, the director should say ‘Never mind. We’re un the U.S. anyway, and faking an accent isn’t important.’
Speaking of pronunciations-- there is a commercial for a dog med (de-wormer? Flea and ticker?) where the voice over lady makes me want to find her and either punch her in the throat or give her elocution lessons. I feel like I may have mentioned this before since it has bugged me for an awful long time.
She puts 'ch’s where they do not belong. She says “vechrinarian” at least 3 times in the short commercial and then adds in a “litcherally” for shits and giggles. ARRRGGHHHH!!!
Antenna TV is the only channel I’m aware of still running Mike Lindell’s commercials. At least three different ones: not just pillows but sheets and towels as well.
I’m with you there! I hate that commercial with a white-hot fiery hate, even more when the damned jingle becomes my earworm. I just want to punch her in the face!!
A sign I’ve been spending too much time on Twitter is eye-rolling at all those Cheech and Chong ads for CBD gummies or whatever crap it is they’re selling. The ads themselves aren’t that bad but it seems like one such ad pops up for every few posts that appear. Are they that hard up for money?
There’s a series of Capital One credit card commercials where the gist of it is, an announcer says something like “getting a Capital One card is as much of a no-brainer as…” and then there’s a supposedly humorous skit of choosing a famous person for a thing who is obviously overqualified. For example, a new one is adding Derek Jeter to your neighborhood softball team. That’s a no-brainer for sure!
But a slightly older one was a setup where Slash is trying out for a garage band, and he’s playing the ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ riff that was famously a placeholder practice riff that they just left in because they were all too high at the time to come up with something better.
And in the commercial, Slash is playing it very much like a practice riff, kind of half-ass and at a slower speed than the song. He sounds very much like a 12 year old with a couple weeks of guitar practice. It was a performance not only phoned in, but phoned in with two tin cans and a string. Yet, the two other guitar players waiting to try out are making faces like “crap, there goes our chance”, and a young woman who is apparently the band manager says “Stop-- you’re in!” very emphatically, like he’s the reincarnation of Hendrix in his prime.
The Slash one was funny the first few times I saw it. Now it’s like the only one they play, and it’s becoming annoying.
There’s a new reason to be annoyed by those commercials. REI used US Bank for their Rewards credit card. Over the decades I’ve redeemed my Rewards points for lots of stuff, and also for cash. Capital One don’t play dat. Rewards may only be redeemed for products at REI. We had a three kilobuck plumbing repair, and I was going to use my $700 in Rewards to help pay for it. ‘Nope,’ Capital One noped. So now I’m disliking Capital One. (On the positive side, I did get a new kayak.)
It looks like the Derek Jeter one I mentioned is becoming the go-to now. I see that one all the time now, and haven’t seen the Slash one in a little while. But yeah, they were playing the Slash one incessantly for a long time there.
As for the humor of the Slash one, maybe it was funny if you took it ironically. As if some Gen Z garage band rockers would be at all impressed by this has-been ancient dino rocker listlessly noodling out a weak version of a not very good riff from an almost 40 year old song. But it annoyed me because they seemed to be playing it straight, as if his ‘demo’ really was blowing the competition away. At least the Derek Jeter gag, though not very funny or original, makes sense in the pretext of the commercial concept “the easiest decision in the history of easy decisions”.
My latest “most annoying ads” are the spots on the MSNBC Sirius feed for some “get cash back when you buy gas” app that takes the “no human beings ever have actually talked like that” faux “casual conversation” schtick up to eleventy zillion.
Whopper, Whopper, Whopper, Whopper…