I post this here because it’s not worthy of getting a Pit thread.
There’s a recent commercial for Fruit Loops that has a husband and wife eating cereal while playing Super Mario Brothers.
Here’s what irks me: she’s just started playing the frigging game, and they’re hooting like a bunch of retarded monkeys. And when I say “just started,” I mean “just started.” She’s excited, and you can still see the goddamn menu to select one or two players!
There’s absolutely NO reason for her to sound orgasmic over hitting the very first coin block, or killing the very first goomba in the game.
Every time I see this commercial, my recreational outrage meter pings higher and higher.
Lack of realism about gaming in cereal advertisements by the liberal feminist copywriter elite is a violent, bullying assault on my rights a gamer and a man! :mad:
I took it as reliving their youth. Eating a favorite childhood cereal and replaying a much-loved but ignored game. They’re so excited because it’s the first time they’ve played since they were each kids and the first time they’ve had Froot Loops since they were kids so they’re over the moon happy from the get go. Like getting Space Mountain again being sooooo excited although the ride hasn’t even begun.
If I walked into a pizza place that had Space Invaders, the first shot would have me shouting with glee.
What makes it even worse is that, isn’t she just miming the game? I’m fairly certain if you turned the game on and just let it run, it would show a “movie” of Mario playing the game. But if you actually pressed Start, I believe the “1 Player Game/2 Player Game” and the logo would disappear. So it looks to me like they just let the game run and she’s just miming the movements, probably on an unplugged controller. Scandalous!
Exactly. She’s not cheering because of the damn game. She’s cheering because of the perfect combination of Froot Loops + Super Mario+ pajamas + NO KIDS IN SIGHT.
And the commercial wins me over. Every time I see it, I’m all “Fuck the concerns over sugar. I want some Froot Loops NOW!!” Breakfast cereals are a deeply engrained part of our childhoods. This commercial capitalizes on this.
(Just the other day I found some youtube clips of old Nintendo games just so I could relive the fun of the early 1990s while brushing my teeth. I love youtube.)
I get the commercial and think it’s mostly brilliant marketing. The execution could have been a little better to have relevance to adult gamers. I can still get the emotional draw with only slight issues with suspending disbelief. Hollywood making action movies/TV usually does far worse with me when involving weapons and they have more time, budget, and experience to get it right.
At least sound effects people seem to have finally gotten over the weird obsession with putting PacMan noises over every single video game in existence. That annoyed me for many years.
My only thought about this commercial is that when my husband and I have a childless evening, you can bet your ass the last thing we’d be doing is sharing a bowl of Froot Loops and playing video games. Who’s with me?
I identify with this commercial. Once in a blue moon I’ll treat myself sugary cereal like Fruit Loops. And while I don’t play video games anymore, SMBs (the one shown in the commercial) was the last game I remember being into before I outgrew video games altogether.
I’d say this is brilliant marketing for the 30ish and 40ish crowd.
I’m not commenting on the content of the commercial. What irks me is how excited they are relative to where in the game they are. I love Fruit Loops and video games, too. Some of my best friends are Fruit Loops.
My favorite example of this is in an old TV movie called “The Kid With the 200 IQ”, in which Gary Coleman plays a kid with a 200 IQ. Naturally, because he has such a high IQ, he is able to instantly play any video game at a high level, even if he’s never played it before. They illustrate this with a scene where he’s playing Defender, and the other arcade patrons are gathering around, oohing and aahing about how amazingly great he is playing.
Then they show the screen, and he is getting his ass kicked, losing each life withing 3 seconds of starting it. It’s just him getting killed over and over while scoring no points.
That seemed like pretty lazy filmmaking to me - they could easily have hired a good Defender player to rack up a score for the camera.
But that’s what I’m saying. They’re excited because they get to play the game at all, not because they’ve gotten really far. It’s a blast from the last and they’re totally psyched from the get go.
