In the states there’s this cereal commercial where you see a bunch of attractive girls doing aerobics or something, and as we zoom out, we here a guy’s voice saying “oh yeah, that’s the ticket” or words to that effect. We zoom out further and find we are looking along the line of a telescope from a room across the street. We pan into the room, however, to find that the male voice was enjoying, not the women’s undulations, but rather an especially good bowl of tasty cereal.
Stupid commercial, and they make annoying eating noises at the end, too. I hate that. But anyway, I noticed some oddities about this commercial.
First, I noticed that the sign outside the aerobics room is written in Japanese Katakana. Odd. Next time I saw the commercial, I noticed that in fact, all the girls are Japanese. (At least, they are Asian. I am assuming Japanese.) Odd again. And the next time I watched the commercial, my wife pointed out that there’s this odd, unneeded fade/break in the middle of the zoom-out. The scene blurs and fades out, and then back in, to an almost identical scene. It’s while we are zooming back to where we can see the telescope.
It’s almost like someone spliced the commercial onto some previously made footage from Japan.
Is that what’s going on? If so, why? Anyone know?
Also, I have this anime called Castle Cagliostro. It’s one of the “Lupin” films (or in English, “The Wolf”). It is very strange watching this film, because I am 99 percent sure that about half of the footage in the film is identical to the footage from a totally different Lupin movie. Does anyone have the skinny on the ins and outs of reusing old footage to make new cartoons? Is this an Anime thing? A Japan thing? Or just a cartoon thing? Or what?
Remember the old “Masters of the Universe” cartoon? I think a healthy 40% of any given episode was weird, heavily rotoscoped stock footage. He-Man running, walking, that over-the-top belly laugh… ugh.
Remember Robotech? How much of any given episode was devoted to lengthy flashbacks or the same Veritech-flipping-all-over-the-place footage?
Re: Lupin III (Castle of Cagliostro)
Just a WAG but a long time ago, a laser disc video game similar to “Space Ace” came out. The game consisted entirely of scenes taken from the movie Lupin III. The object was to move the joy stick at exactly the right moment. If you didn’t Lupin died.
That laserdisc game would be “Cliff Hanger”, which actually came out before Space Ace but after Dragon’s Lair, the ground breaking laserdisc game that defined the genre. Cliff Hanger was a poor imitation that used animation from Castle Caligostro; whenever you did something wrong (no matter what the situation), you saw the protagonist hanging by a rope from the neck.
Yes, that’s a fine commercial. The only thing I don’t like is the end (yes, after the exercising babes are off the screen). The guys are eating this cereal loudly and obnoxiously, and they hold their spoons in the “barbaric” over-hand fashion.
I was in the store the other day and almost grabbed a box of Raisin Bran Crunch (Tastes so good, breakfast is back), but then I remembered this and their other commercials. It’s supposed to show that perverts, with nothing to do all day but stare at women doing exercises, eat the stuff so you should too. The worst of which is the one where the guy needs milk for his cereal and goes to milk a cow and the mentally retarded girl says “do you think we should tell him it’s a boy cow?” First, there is no such thing as a “boy cow,” there is a cow (female) and a bull (male), that’s like saying “a boy woman.” Second, it IS a female. Notice the lack of 'nads hanging down with an udder in its place? That’s female anatomy. Even the body structure is that of a cow (uh, a female cow if you require the redundancy).
Dale, I think the point of the commercial is that they’re NOT watching the women. We just assume they’re going to be, but they’re just enjoying a nice wholesome bowl of cereal.
The oddest thing about that commercial (to me) are the enormous Jethro Bodine sized bowls they are eating out of while holding their spoons like little chidren.