A series of current commercials I’d like explained to me-- I think it’s for a mini-van. It’s a family where the mom and dad seem like real jerks. They make their 2 year old daughter wash the car and act like real jerks. Is this supposed to make me want to buy the car?
An old commercial I never got-- Travis, you’re years too late! Huh?
The Vizio KIN.
“Here’s Andrew. He has a Vizio KIN. He’s meeting up with all of his virtual friends in real life. Here he is in an incredibly awkward situation with his ex-girlfriend for no apparent reason. Now he’s doing something on a computer that has no apparent connection to what we just showed you. The KIN!”
What?
I just got back from India, where a certain Mentos commercial has been playing constantly on TV. It’s moderately amusing, sure, but for those of you who don’t want to hit the link, it goes like this: prehistoric donkey enslaves monkey. Monkey eats Mentos. Monkey discovers fire, humanity, and the wheel in approximately that order. Monkey enslaves donkey.
Now I get the story, but I just can’t find any link between mentos, Neanderthals, and animal husbandry no matter how hard I look.
Will somebody please explain to this ad? It seems completely normal until the 24 second mark and then all kinds of Japanese crazy breaks loose. Just watch the animals, and then the building at the end.
It’s been years since I’ve seen it, and I still knew exactly what commercial you were talking about the moment I read “animals”.
(Warning: PG-13 language follows, as does about 500 uses of the word ‘nuts’.)
Anyway, it’s for a construction company called Anabuki Construction Co. Roughly translated, the dialog goes as follows:“The Anabuki Construction Company’s Campaign Girl is the good girl that everybody knows, it’s Anabukin-chan!” (animals pop up) “Oh? It looks like the forest creatures have gathered, too! How about everyone sing out happily together? Ready, aaaand…” chorus “Anabukin-chan!” Anabukin “Yea!” singing starts “Expanding dreams, service machine! Expanding hopes, service machine! Even the chests are expanding, expanding, expanding, service machine!” bouncing racoon-dog testicles “Wow!” (“service machine”) (“Anabuki Construction Company.”)
Fade To Black.
Anyway, the main point here is that Japanese Commercials Are Weird, even to the Japanese. The fact that the furry forest critters have whopping double Ds is marginally more understandable given that they chose to make their big climax about breast augmentation instead of something more construction-related, and little red riding corporate shill’s forest friends showing up to help her work is understandable if creepy.
So that brings us to the giant bouncing testicles. Oddly enough, this is probably the LEAST strange thing about the ad to the Japanese- the critter being portrayed is a ‘tanuki’, and while it’s often translated as ‘racoon’ or ‘racoon dog’, tanuki are actually completely distinct animals. They have a vaguely fox-shaped body, but a ringed snout and eyes. I believe wikipedia has some nice pictures of them.
Also, their testicles are f**king huge.
Except they aren’t. Tanuki are signs of good luck and particularly of monetary luck or fortune, and have been portrayed in paintings, carvings, and especially traveller’s shrines, where they often occur as wooden or stone statues. Their testicles are uniformly depicted as being enormous, and at least some people nowadays tend to assume that this is an exaggeration of a real observation. (And I mean uniformly depicted people- it is IMPOSSIBLE to write or paint or carve something about tanuki without mentioning how honkin’ magnanimous their baby maker makers are.)
In reality, however, the external genitalia of the tanuki are sized and proportioned appropriately for their mass, although the wild ones are a bit larger than their domestic cousins. “But wait,” you might ask yourself, “I have myself seen at least some form of mammal bling in my time, and while often impressive compared to that of the simpering, hairless ape what constitutes my own constituency they are nothing to write home to, or centuries of exaggerations about. What gives?”
What does, in fact, give, is a pun that’s probably 4-500 years old: during the Edo Period (frequently referred to as the Tokugawa Period after its founder and first ruler/military dictator). Starting in 1601, a good 2 years before he formally declared himself dictator for life and all around rockin’ dude, Tokugawa Ieyasu decided that the economy needed a firm kick in the hindquarters. At the time, the most popular and stable unit of value and exchange was not currency, but the rice future- you could buy freakin’ anything with the promise of food to come or land to make food come out of. “Despite being a largely agrarian economy we need to get out of this here rut,” Tokugawa said to himself. To that end, he introduced Tokugawa Coinage. If you’re still reading by this point, there is a small chance that you might be asking yourself “What do I need to know about Tokugawa coinage?” Well, here’s what you need to know: no matter how much you love it, Tokugawa’s currency system does not love you. In fact it HATES you, it hates your little dog too, and nothing makes it happier than a chance to utterly screw with your research by being re-valued without a hard peg yet AGAIN, for like the FIFTIETH TIME in TWO CENTURIES, and now you have to spend another 10 hours in the archives instead of eating pizza and goofing off like a good asia scholar, who do those Tokugawa jerkholes think they were anyway, trying to bury rice futures and screwing it up for people 500 years down the road… cough
Anyway, the salient point here is that one of the coins that Tokugawa introduced was called the Oban. It was freakin’ huge, made out of freakin’ gold, and the minting process used frickin’ tanuki skin. Not the skin of the fun-time parts, though- the whole stinkin’ critter. Some 17th century metallurgist just up and scooped one up one day and said to himself “After I eat this, I think I’ll make a unit of exchange out of it.”
So, ready for the fun part? “kintama”, a common premodern slang for Tanuki nuts, literally translates as “golden ball”, with “tama” meaning “ball”. Golden ball is supposed to remind you of those huge circular gold coins that some jerkass up in the new capital is making, but guess what else “tama” made people think of? So just because some guy’s brand-new currency system happened to look like what people imagined tanuki-nasties sounded like, artists went wild depicting their nuts for the next five centuries.
There was also a very popular story during the pre-Tokugawa years about a Tanuki running into some old dude, clubbing him to death for no damn reason, and feeding him to his unwitting wife in soup. But that’s neither here nor there. Or anywhere, really.
So I guess the moral of the story is to not ask about Japanese commercials, because if you have to the explanation is likely to be much weirder than the actual commercial.
There’s a commercial with two guys in a car saying something to that effect (well, a tad more TV-friendly), when suddenly WHAM car accident, someone ran the light and T-boned their car. I can’t remember what it’s for, probably the durable car in question or something.
Actually, those commercials imply that bad credit dooms both you and your friends to a life of drudgery at a fried fish joint.
Also, that is an awesome post, Omi no Kami!
There was a commercial out recently that featured Prego spaghetti sauce. The ad said something about not choosing the competitor’s sauce because it came in a gasp! jar. Instead they recommended you buy Prego sauce, which comes in…a jar?! WTF?
Not sure how to link properly but if you go to You Tube and search “Prego Saucepan”, the ad will come up.
Target audience here-- currently trying to watch The Mentalist, and wife’s on phone with her (apparently getting hard-of-hearing) mother. But we only have rabbit ears, so I sit here tryyyyying to hear the dialog.
And watch some of these commercials. The little girl in the van is on. I HATE this. The dad invited the girl to move up forward, and I was disgusted: you want your daughter to sit up in the passenger seat, at her age? You clueless jerk! By the time I realized she was in the middle seat, I already hated him and the ad, and never did understand it, even after way-too-many viewings.
At least the “Trouble” dog is explained by the end of the ad. And he’s cute (reminds me of Wishbone).
BTW, as an ad guy, I’ve pointed out to clients that “Please call your doctor if your erection lasts longer than four hours” is brilliant marketing. Nothing like saying “Oh, yeah, it works! Maybe too well…”
And I hope I have the fortitude to stay away from weird raccoon-dog-testicle Japanese commercials… is there a 12-step sponsor I can call if I’m tempted?
The point of the commercial wasn’t to not choose a sauce because it was in a jar, it was that if you asked people what brand they like just by showing them the jar, most people would say they prefer Classico (that was the brand they were comparing themselves to.)
Probably because the Classico label looks fancy, comes in an old-school Mason jar, etc…
Yet if you do a blind taste taste, most people prefer Prego.
And this is why I love SDMB.
McDonald’s is now running a commercial showing people getting into a cab and after telling the driver where they want to go they say some variation on “but don’t hurry”. The reason they aren’t in a hurry is that they want to have enough time to enjoy their hamburger on the way.
Now, ignoring the fact that I’m sure the cabdrivers are thrilled that these people are eating in their cab, but if you’re not in a hurry, why don’t you just eat your burger in the restaurant instead of getting it to go? Even more confusing, most of them are shown running to catch the cab, which seems to contradict their claim that they’re not in a hurry.
What? She’s in the middle row in a station wagon. What’s the big deal?
The new Geico commercials with the caveman on a crab boat aren’t making much sense, but I’m kind of hopeful about the direction they seem to be moving in.
I can’t find the second one, but it involves the caveman getting pissy with a crew member who comes to the galley in search of a hot bowl of chili and instead sees a table full of poncy gourmet crap.
With luck, this series will end with the crew getting fed up and throwing the caveman to the sharks.
Right, but when he first invited her to “move up”, I assumed it was to the front seat. Which I have seen clueless parents do. Put a toddler in the Death Seat.
And it made my blood boil, long before I realized it was the middle seat.
So then, as I calmed down, I waited for some big payoff, maybe a reason to buy their vehicle… nope.
There’s a Lexus commercial that shows a wine glass being broken by the car’s exhaust note. What are they trying to say - is it live or is it Lexus?
So, how did the Boggards fare with all this? Did they get enough from Levi to maybe get some rehab to help with their singing problem? 
They were actually filmed on the crab boat Time Bandit, which is one of the boats featured on the Discovery Channel series Deadliest Catch. If you’ve ever seen the show, life on a crab boat is no pleasure cruise. It is hard, dangerous work. If you can’t do the job, you can die, get hurt, or get put on a boat going ashore. Obviously not a job for a pampered, spoiled caveman.
I’ve just seen the second commercial once so far, but I think the caveman was actually serving crab for dinner, which obviously doesn’t set well with the captain. After all, it’s their livelihood that the caveman is dishing up. They put their lives on the line for that crab and depend on it for their income. It’s the reason the boat is at sea in the first place.
Hence my hope that the caveman will soon be chum.
I hate the new Yahoo commercial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie4zP7gTgLA
It’s annoying as hell, though that may be that you have to watch it to the entire end before you have any clue what it’s for.