Has everyone missed that the “silly faerie/fairy” version IS STILL PLAYING? Apparantly there are two versions of the ad, one for free TV, one for cable.
FTR, this is anecdotal evidence. I just saw it again last night on a cable channel. Maybe they just haven’t gotten the upgrade yet, or maybe the ad agency feels cable is a different enough market, I don’t know. YMMV, esp if my cable channels are simply behind the times.
Can you be specific as to what groups within the gay community are “protesting” the ad? Commercial Closet gave it a negative review, which does not equal “protest.” As near as I can tell, GLAAD hasn’t said a word about Chrysler since it pulled ads from “Ellen” a decade ago. HRC hasn’t apparently said anything about the ad. 365gay.com has no story on the topic. The only mention of it I can turn up at the Advocate’s website (which I can’t access directly for some reason at the moment) is a poll, in which responses are evenly split between “funny” and “offensive” (with 11% not caring enough to form an opinion).
So where is this vast “protest” of which you speak? Is it anywhere outside your own mind?
I’m not Weirddave, but I don’t see where he said there was a “vast protest”, nor that ANY “groups” were protesting. He said some members of the gay community, which is true. For example, several members of the gay community right here on the SDMB have been protesting. And I mean protesting in the “expressing disapproval” sense, not protesting in the “organized mass action” sense, which I got the feeling is how Weirddave meant it as well. But he can come along and clarify that if he wants to.
To pull a snippet from an earlier post of his:
This says to me that he believes that the group Commercial Closet is expressing outrage and that other gay community organizations are also expressing outrage. As
I pointed out initially, this so-called “outrage” from Commercial Closet amounts to a negative review. No other groups that I could find are expressing outrage.
I don’t believe for a moment that he meant the “expressing disapproval” sense, although now that he’s been dealt the out I wouldn’t be surprised to see him say that he did.
Meh. I still got the impression he meant it in the “methinks they do protest too much” sense of the word. But we’ll have to ask him to be sure.
Me neither. For the claim that this has anything to do with “political correctness” to hold water, it’s gonna have to be shown that there was some sort of actual political force brought to bear on Dodge.
In fact, if Weirddave were describing his views honestly, he ought to be congratulating the gay community. After all, many of us were offended by the commercial in question. I sure was, and no one’s come up any counterargument more convincing than that they didn’t get the joke. But there’s no evidence of any sort of effort to force Dodge to change the commercial. No letter-writing campaigns, no protests, nothing. Maybe Dodge just decided to change it upon hearing discussions of how gay people felt about it. Or, more likely, they engineered the whole thing to create some sort of controversy and haven’t been nearly as spectacularly successful as Weirddave imagines.
The bottom line is that there’s no evidence anyone’s actually done what Weirddave is complaining about. A lot of us have been offended, but there’s certainly no signs of outrage. And it appears to be the case that those of us who were offended have mostly kept to ourselves. Where’s the kudos, Weirddave?
Amazingly enough, no one’s crossed the line so far in this thread; however, I’m thinking it’s rapidly approaching the point where it’s better-suited for the Pit. I’ll move it for you.
This philosophy actually applies to Buick.
Whenever I saw a Buick ad with Tiger Woods behind the wheel, I could always tell he was thinking “Get me out of this thing!” 
The “silly little fairy” line raised my eyebrow too, but I sort of dismissed it because the guy didn’t look gay to me. He didn’t really correspond to any of the broad gay pop-culture stereotypes, positive or negative…not fashionable, not flamboyant, not especially feminine…more like effete. He looked like an effete straight guy in bad clothes. Like a bad guy in an 80’s fraternity movie, a la “Up The Creek” or “Robot House” or something. A modern day fop.
Dude was turned into wimp with a toy dog. In my circles, if that’s not gay, that’s close enough.
It’s called plausible deniability. It’s called ambivalence.
Actually, since both versions seem to be still on the air, it appears that PC has nothing to do with it, otherwise the original version would be totally removed, yet it still appears.
(I suspect that there has been more removed than just that line, but all the cuts are very short and provided simply enough time to squeeze in tags that direct the viewer to local distributors, (something that I don’t recall in the original) or similar small changes. This is just one more case of those who wander about taking offense at third party actions when they perceive that someone whom they wish had been offened might not actually take offense because the third party inadvertantly removed the potential insult.)