Have you seen this? *I mean, have you seen this?? * It’s the life insurance commercial featuring Mickey Rooney and his wife Jan. Jan does most of the talking, which is fine, but in one prolonged segment filmed in their kitchen (it’s a long spot, 1 or 2 minutes long) we see Mickey in the background doing the dishes…except there aren’t any dishes. He’s miming it and it’s awful; he looks like a mental patient, picking up invisible cutlery and so forth. Then he turns around and faces the camera…he faces the camera…right in the middle of Jan’s spiel. Of course, the shot is framed so that you can’t see his face, but you can clearly see that he turns around…then he goes back to his fake dishwashing (after seeing the horrified look on the director’s face I’m sure).
I had a witty reponse to this, but I left the “reply” window open too long in the background, and alas, I am without wit. Witless it seems. Perhaps even at wit’s end.
It’s such a bizarre commercial, isn’t it? What about when she tells Mickey to leave the snacks alone because they were for the kids. What’s that have to do with anything?
A slight hijack: I remember when Mickey and Jan first got married and she was this hot young thing. They pissed off Letterman one night.
Not entirely on-topic, but something that just popped into my head. Being Mickey Rooney’s current wife is sort of like being chosen last for a pick-up game of baseball, isn’t it?
I saw this commercial. I’ve considered starting a thread on it, because I find it deeply disturbing. Jan is WAY too outgoing, does all the talking, and Mickey looks like death warmed over. He washes imaginary dishes. He stares vacantly at random walls. He eats other people’s food. He says about one sentence. Has he had a stroke? This is really scary. No one in that kind of condition should be paraded before the public.
Seriously. There’s this commercial, the Super Bowl one, which was mercifully cancelled, and I think I’ve seen another one recently. I have this idea that he is broke and/or deeply in debt to the mob, and must work, and the mob is putting pressure on insurance companies to hire him so they get their money back. Or there is a really bad Groucho/Erin Flemming thing going on between him and Jan, and she’s milking his fame for all it’s worth before he keels over.
Whenever I see this ad, the first thing that appears in my head is the way they dragged Bob Hope to ‘advertise’ for K-Mart near the end of his life.
Of course when I say ‘advertise’, what I mean is that they give him about a second and a half in a thirty second spot where he looks confused, staring off into space, or a wall, or a Icee machine and says “K-Mart, that’s good savings”, and instead of wanting to shop there, you just want to run down to the store where he is at and help him onto the senior citizen bus that is parked outside and getting ready to leave without him while he rambles on about ‘good savings’ to nobody in particular.
I acutally hadn’t noticed this until someone else pointed it out to me, and now the commercial sort of makes my skin crawl. I can only assume there HAS to be a reasonable explanation for it. My theory is they were filming that bit as a rehearsal or something, then said “Ok, let’s try a real one with actual dishes” and either she kept flubbing her lines or the actual dishes made too much noise or something so they said “Ah, screw it - use the practice tape.”
As far as the broke theory goes, he did recently file for bankruptcy (again- it’s at least his second go-round and possibly more).
I just assumed he was in character for a new short movie, BILL DOES A COMMERCIAL. “I’m a paid commercial representative… Bill for short… you need insurance when you’re no longer a real spring chicken!”
I actually remembered reading a blurb about this commerical a few months ago. Parade Magazine said that the commercial is designed to appeal to women. Whatever that means.
Does he have a pace maker? Because he has a strange and rather large lump in the middle of his chest.
I wondered why his wife did all the talking in the commercial. I didn’t notice the fake dish washing until this thread.
