I have been seeing a tv commercial for Raisin Bran Crunch recently with a dad and daughter fishing on a pier. It seems cute enough, with the daughter teasing dad about his crunchy cereal scaring off the fish. But the soundtrack to the ad is Warren Zevon’s song Werewolves of London, hardly a wholesome family song if you know the lyrics.
Has anyone else encountered a commercial with a soundtrack disconnect?
Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” being used by Royal Caribbean Cruises is kind of the gold standard here, isn’t it? And, assuming that “There She Goes” by The La’s really is about heroin like we are all pretty sure that it is, hearing it in a commercial for birth control is amusingly oddball.
That comes up quite a bit when the songs are not in the same language as the ad.
I’ve seen a Toyota family SUV ad using “21st Century Schizoid Man” and a Honda one using “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”.
And while the song used in this ad is totally appropriate, it will probably make Monty Python fans giggle.
There was a Microsoft ad, maybe around the Vista era, with the overt question, “Where Do You Want To Go Today?”
The dramatic background music was (from memory) from Mozart’s Requiem, and the Latin lyrics were “the damned are sentenced and cast down into hell.”
But that’s no different than using “Born in the USA” or “Fortunate Son” for Chevy trucks and the like. Or many other cool clips from truly inappropriate songs.
Some sort of depression drug used (and sung) “Feelin’ Alright?” by Dave Mason. The song is about someone angry and depressed about losing his lover.
The commercial knew this, and sung “Feelin’ Alright” and didn’t add the next line: “Not feeling too good myself.”
I can’t remember now what the commercial was for, but it showed a person (in slow motion perhaps) looking all excited about something, while rousing string music played. At the very end of the commercial, the sound of the chorus comes in singing these words: “Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed…”
(not the commercial, just the music)
The music part fit with the commercial, but not those words.
I remember a local commercial in Anchorage a few decades back hawking a new housing development. The tag was something like “Move someplace that has it all” or something like that. Would have been fine, but the background music was “California Dreamin’!”
Ad: : A man tailgating in Bills cold-weather gear can’t open his Bills-branded can of Bud Light with his thick gloves on. To his chagrin, he gives up, takes off a glove, pops the can open, and draws the can upwards as the scene ends.
Music: an instrumental version of the intro to “Nobody Speak” by DJ Shadow and featuring Run the Jewels. The lyrics that would otherwise be playing in the ad: “Picture this, I’m a bag of dicks, put me to your lips.”
Ad: Bud Light TV Spot, 'Gloves' - iSpot.tv
Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUC2EQvdzmY (NSFW audio; link broken)
Hat tip: User ChrisS from Football Outsiders