That’s tone-deaf meaning (in the UK) a horrible misjudgement of tone – I assume it means the same in the States. And this is all my own opinion, of course.
I don’t want to make this OP too heavy - but there’s no getting around the fact that what started me thinking was pretty grim. A documentary on the Smithsonian Channel last night about a family with a high incidence of dwarfism. Jewish – the Ovitz family – in wartime Romania, rounded up and shipped to Auschwitz. The subject of medical experiments led by Josef Mengele – detail here, not nice. The happy ending is that surprisingly, miraculously even, the family survived intact.
I know this from the Wiki article; I couldn’t bring myself to watch the documentary – because of the title. The Seven Dwarfs Of Auschwitz. I shit you not* – what were they thinking? OK, in my imagination, this is how it plays out:
At night. In an office, the Commissioning Editor is reading the script by a desk light. Suddenly he leaps up and punches the air in glee.
*Seven?? We got us a title! *
Cut to the production meeting. The Director clears his throat nervously.
Ah……the title……don’t you think there’s a risk of the “Seven Dwarfs” thing being perceived as just a little bit – well – totally crass and trivialising? You know, of a family subjected to medical experiments by Josef Mengele in a concentration camp?
There are blank looks all round……
It can’t be the only tone-deaf title ever dreamed up. I would like to see others – ideally with better potential for humour, but all contributions gratefully received. Documentaries, ill-judged comedies, whatever.
There maybe should be a different thread for this and the last one, but I remember Renault pitching its cars on TV with a cartoon character speaking with a French accent. The tone-deaf part? The character was a frog.
He later used that as the title for his book on advertising. This was probably seen as funny at the time (heck, it made me buy a copy), but is a lot less so nowadays.
Della Femina himself offered up the slogan, but it was a joke, designed to lighten the mood during a brainstorming session when no progress was being made. What made the story work was the next line in the book:
It definitely occurred to Israelis - that’s why the show was translated as “Ha’Ish Hashaveh Milionim” (“The Man Worth Millions”) and the number 6,000,000 was never mentioned.