It is parodying the “Xtreme” genre generally, including but not limited to Red Bull commercials, the X-games, and those Christian shows where a guy tears a phonebook in half, breaks 6 boards with his forehead, and tells you to believe in God because he’s so strong. It mocks this genre by picking an intentionally stupid display of power and xtremeness (tearing objects in half which cannot be torn, like a car or a mattress). The message of the commercial is to buy the product because the company is cool and hip. And whether it succeeds at that message is fully open to your criticism. But that it is indeed mocking extreme acts of physical prowess seems quite obvious, and your criticism of it for portraying that which it mocks is unpersuasive (to me, at least).
Well, for one, because most people enjoy the mockery of that which they find to be ugly and stupid.
Hyperbolic exaggeration of a genre for humorous effect is what parody means by any objective standard (I’m partial to the OED). So what we’re left with is your argument that parody, in advertising, functions to convey the message is mocks through comedic exaggeration. Fair enough. Mocking a message does involve conveying that message, and any publicity is good publicity and all that, but in my book mockery undermines a message.
I am sympathetic to your criticism that the irony/parody/satire label is often used as a defense of things which deserve neither the label nor the defense. I just don’t think that it applies here.
Richard Parker, thanks for your thoughts. I will now repay you poorly by inflicting mine upon you.
We seem to agree on almost everything, which is always dangerous. But I (and I have tried) cannot agree that “feats of strength” generally is a genre or style or point of view that is consistent, coherent and defineable enough to qualify as a target for parody. Even you, a model of consistency by the standards of the thread, are lumping together actual physical demonstrations like tearing a phonebook in half for Jesus with Red Bull’s gentle fantasies of sprouting wings and fluttering away from trouble and strife, with the X-Games, which present loud and unusual but honest competitions, few (if any) of which in fact even involve gross strength. And to be honest, I don’t see how the DD commercial passes muster as a parody of any of those – there just aren’t enough parallels to remind me one of the other, without which there’s no parody no matter how much one particular element is twisted or stretched. But that’s a matter of personal taste. Obviously you were struck by something that resonated with your impressions of all these disparate originals, and the something was funny. Fine. I can explain why I don’t like something without insisting that everyone else forfeit any enjoyment it may have given them. The bottom line for me is, the parodic value of the ad is just too weak to overcome the adverse reaction I had to the images themselves. For me.
And that’s where we’ll probably have to leave it. We may not have convinced nor confounded each other, but I’m a little better acquainted with the ideas surrounding this topic, my own as well as others’, and I have you, mostly, to thank for it. And this time I’ll thank you properly, by shutting up.
These are from the mid 90’s. The cheetah ad you mentioned? 2000. IOW, years after the campaign I was talking about. When they started doing wackier stuff, like that Bohemian Rhapsody one, and that Davey and Goliath parody (your definition, even).
And of course Mountain Dew wasn’t the only one doing these types of ads - it’s just easy to search for “Do the Dew”.
And “parody” isn’t a high horse.
And not getting a joke doesn’t mean stupid. It just means you’re so unfamiliar with the subject that you think “junk food gives you the drive to do crazy and destructive things” has more to do with “sugar makes you hyper” than it does with “lets, through no real logic, associate our product with doing cool shit”.
Let me preface this by saying, in the interest of keeping my promise, Richard Thomas is entitled to ignore this post.
pizzabrat, I admire you for finally deciding to dance with the one what brung ya. But I swear that your first link is a depiction of an over-the-top, obviously faked car stunt, the second is either (my computer is mediocre, my eyes are worse, my glasses are elsewhere) a dry-land luge or mini-racer rally covering three or more continents, and the third is an I-don’t-know-what involving skiboarding off Mt. Everest, bungee-jumping, the release of a dove, and four admiring women. And I’ll be damned if any of those is meant to be realistic in the slightest degree. And there’s no way that any of them has the element of brute strength at all, much less strength brought about by consumption of the product (the ads seem to depict their foolish acts as attempts to obtain the product, not as effects thereof), so I’m still faced with an almost perfect disconnect between the DD commercial and any attempt at parody of the sources you’ve presented. But as I said to Richard Parker, you obviously saw something there, so I won’t try to suggest it’s an impossible construction. But…
Yes, I do, and I think upon reflection you might as well. See, if there’s “no real logic” to the association, then there’s no parody there. The result may be fanciful, but the connection between the parody and its object has to be real. Surely you can see in your own words a stronger link between the first two items than between the first and third, can’t you?
None of this means you’re positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, wrong. But I will, as my very last effort in this thread, beg you to consider that sometimes a more limited experience and narrower understanding may result in the perception of a connection between two familiar things, where a broader and deeper view may dismiss such bridges as superficial. I’m not accusing you of the former, nor claiming for myself the latter. I’m just asking you to consider that sometimes a similarity we think is strong fades into obscurity when a wider picture is observed.
I wonder whether you perceive that the DD commercial is rather more tongue-in-cheek than the Mountain Dew commercial. I assume you see the difference in tone, beyond mere exaggeration. They’ve torn apart the car that got them into the woods, the boat next to the lake, the foosball table they are attempting to use. Indeed, everything they tear apart it looks as if they needed to use or are about to need. It’s comical. If you see this, to what do you attribute this if not an attempt at mocking the “rip things in half” style?
For reference, if you have the time, look up the episode of the TV show Clone High titled “Election Blu-Galoo.” (I’m sure it’s on the internets somewhere, and this is for educational purposes!) Much of the episode is devoted to exactly the sort of parody this commercial attempts. Perhaps seeing it in a different context will give you a better idea of what **pizzabrat **and I are seeing.