I really, really hoped Gerber would end its series of baby food commercials using creepy babies doing cartwheels, juggling, doing math and magic tricks. Here’s an example. But no, they keep coming out with new versions. Are there so many people calling and telling them “It’s adorable! I’m buying a dozen cases of food now!” that they don’t notice the dozens and dozens of Google pages that say the ads are creepy? I simply have to change the channel every time I see one.
Gah! Those things are deep in the uncanny valley.
The part the gets me the most is they have kids’ heads but their torsos and limbs have adult proportions.
Obviously someone’s shopped a child’s head on an adult’s body, but shouldn’t an ad company putting out a national commercial be able to blend the two better?
Higher quality version here.
Doesn’t creep me out, though.
That commerical reminds me of this - YouTube. Which I found even creepier.
If people think the OP is being melodramatic, go ahead, click away. Just don’t blame me if HP Lovecraft writes the coda of your life, gibbering in a mental hospital and tracing eldritch drawings onto the padded walls.
I feel much better knowing that I’m not the only one creeped out by these “things”. Ugh! The smiles that are plastered on their faces? They should be called Stepford Babies.
Blechhh. Even creepier than “Puddingface.”
Ew, no! For heaven’s sake, let babies be babies! :mad:
The “pudding face” eyes aren’t smiling. They look as if they are in a hell with no escape and are desperately looking around smiling and trying to fake it. Hate that commercial, too.
OK, pudding face is awful, but I’m just not getting the weirdness in the Gerber ads. It would never have occurred to me that anyone would hate them before this thread.
The problem is two-fold…first, they don’t move like normal babies. Their limbs are oddly elongated and don’t even move like real humans! They remind me of that stupid dancing baby from Ally McBeal, but even worse…that at least was obviously meant as a cartoon. And secondly, the crazy fixed smile faces, especially on the magic trick girl.
It’s definitely creepy, but nothing is worse than puddingface.
Kill it with fire.
Now that one is awesome! Maybe it’s the old school rap, but that was cool.
The Gerber ones, those are indeed all kinds of creepy. Especially the magic trick girl. It looks like a creature that would climb out of a box and convince Anthony Hopkins to murder people.
Exactly!
Put me on the bandwagon here: kids are hilarious enough without having to trick them up with CGI. And can we say Uncanny Valley when they do?
Where did the term Uncanny Valley come from? I’ve never heard it before, and all of a sudden it’s popping up in a lot of threads around here.
A robotics guy named Masahiro Mori named it.
Note the graph. As things get more humanlike we like them more. But at some point, it’s “almost human, but not quite” and it’s damn creepy. After that it is ok because it looks human. This dip, or valley, is where the name comes from.
Meh, I’m not getting the creep factor. Just another CGI commercial. I’ll take that over Flo any day.
Yeah, I don’t get the creepy either. I wonder if some folks just find babies creepy. This would not surprise me.