Commercial rant time...

[Drtooth]

Progresso soup. Apparently kids won't touch veggies, but will devour them if you smother them (the veggies, not the kids) in broth (or Manwich sauce, or ranch dressing for that matter).

What's worse? It's obviously Vegetable Soup. Yeah. Really smart kids you have there if they don't know that vegetable soup has vegetables in it. I get vegetables hiding in things well enough (fruit juices, things like that. I once bought some Japanese cookies that hid vegetables in fruit flavors... the pumpkin apple ones were amazing), but vegetable soup is hiding in plain sight.

It used to be father figures were the ones the rest of the family turned to for wisdom and guidance. Now it seems most don't know which way is up. Tragic business.

It's more of an overrused trope, really. When it works well, it works well, like the goofy father of Berenstain Bears, or even Homer Simpson to the extent that everyone in his family but Lisa is bonkers... but I've yet to see a commercial that does it properly. It's best left to TV shows where goofy characters can have hidden depths. Here, all men are just stupid, and it seems like a bad apology by men for commercials that objectify women to sell men stuff. Heck, they make men stupid in their own commercials for them. I don't mind if they at least get the comedy right. Here, they're using old blonde jokes.

 

[Drtooth]

If there's one commercial I absolutely loathe it's that awful, long form Gerald McBoing-Boing ripoff I see in front of every movie. If you don't know what I'm talking about, and I don't even want to dignify it with a YT search, it goes like this...

We see a woman who just gave birth... later we see the baby can only make mechanical sounds... this is treated as a tragedy (and somehow managing to be offensive to parents of children with disabilities)... blah blah blah, then it turns into a quirky indie film comedy about how the kid manipulates machines with his Vocaloid/Autotune voice. I don't even wanna bother walking through the rest of it. It's chintzy and emotionally manipulative, and it's supposed to feel like some sort of mock Spike Jonez movie. And there we have it... a commercial that wants to be a movie and all artistic and human conditiony. And guess what it sells? Business to Business logistic something or others from GE. In other words... something the general movie going public isn't going to buy (and I don't think they can). And it's...before...every...single...movie! The commercial has its head so far up it's own butt, and it's just freaking terrible.

 

[The Count]

Okay... What the heck is Honda Motors doing promoting their gas-guzzling death machines with "popular" cartoon characters?
There are two of these I've seen now: one that has a whole group that I can't identify, and another one with Strawberry Shortcake & Friends. Seriously? ! ? At least Toyota's Highlander "No Room For Boring" campaign with the Muppets was explainable because they were promoting MMW as well at the time of original airing. But this?
There is a funny bit where Strawberry angrily tells her "friends" to "get their own commercial!"

 

[mr3urious]

Okay... What the heck is Honda Motors doing promoting their gas-guzzling death machines with "popular" cartoon characters?
There are two of these I've seen now: one that has a whole group that I can't identify, and another one with Strawberry Shortcake & Friends. Seriously? ! ? At least Toyota's Highlander "No Room For Boring" campaign with the Muppets was explainable because they were promoting MMW as well at the time of original airing. But this?
There is a funny bit where Strawberry angrily tells her "friends" to "get their own commercial!"

I quite liked those Honda commercials, especially the Shortcake and Skeletor ones. Seems like they're trying to appeal to the millennials with all those '80s toys.

 

[Drtooth]

Those are quite fun, actually. In a season where these car commercials become quite disgusting or at the very least baffling, it's nice to see some fun ones for a change. I quite like the Jem one and the one with Gumby. Never saw the Skeletor one, though. But you got to admit, they're really doing something big when they feature rival toy companies (Hasbro and Mattel) as spokesmen.

The one I have a problem with is just the most baffling lyrical dissonance I've ever seen. Yeah, they can sell sea cruises with songs about drug addiction and herbal shampoos to the tune of completely trashing the beauty industry, but the most idiotic one has to be Cadillac's new holiday themed ad.

They use a Christmas music remix of "My Baby Drove Off in a Brand New Cadillac" showing happy people playing in the snow next to their cars. Okay... it's a song about a woman leaving someone. And as peppy and happy as the music is... it's about a woman leaving someone! How...how does that make any sense? It's not like you could just snip out lyrics of the song and change the meaning. It's a jolly Christmas commercial where they sing about a woman leaving someone!

 

[Drtooth]

UGH!

Audi brought back the annoying, chubby, dorky looking woman elf from last year for their commercials. And giving her essentially the same non-joke. Like it was funny the first time.

She is the worst commercial spokesthing ever.

 

[KremlingWhatnot]

So, did anyone else manage to see the new Mcdonalds commercial with the dancing fries, anyways, so the commercial starts with some music that the fries dance, and then some people look at the fries, then we get a DUN DUN DUN! a sponsor for the new spicy mcchicken there having now, so IT WAS A FALSE ADVERTISEMENT, okay, if anything, why didn't you just HAVE THE MCCHICKEN DANCE!!!, I know that would have been impossible to do in Stop-Motion, and yes the fries were animated in Stop-Motion, and I can tell cause there only moving one side of the fry box, but yeah, animate a realistic CGI Mcchicken and we didn't have a complaint from me and a false advertisement, seriously, this commercial has been bugging me for the past week and I even tried to show it to my cousin a couple days ago but couldn't find it on YouTube, yes, it's that bad.

 

[Drtooth]

I've never seen that one, actually.

Thankfully other than that pudgy, annoying woman dressed up as an elf (SHE WASN'T FUNNY, AUDI!), I don't have much to complain about this year's Christmas car commercials. I usually find them to be the epitome of what's wrong with Christmas, especially the luxury cars. I also was never a fan of diamond commercials.

There was this awful one about penguins that annoyed me, that essentially gave the moral of a thoughtfilled gift isn't thoughtfilled unless you have a crapload of money to blow on a rock that's only worth something because the guys selling it to you say so.

 

[KremlingWhatnot]

I've never seen that one, actually.

Thankfully other than that pudgy, annoying woman dressed up as an elf (SHE WASN'T FUNNY, AUDI!), I don't have much to complain about this year's Christmas car commercials. I usually find them to be the epitome of what's wrong with Christmas, especially the luxury cars. I also was never a fan of diamond commercials.

There was this awful one about penguins that annoyed me, that essentially gave the moral of a thoughtfilled gift isn't thoughtfilled unless you have a crapload of money to blow on a rock that's only worth something because the guys selling it to you say so.

You mean that ice penguin game? yeah, that commercial and it's product is stupid .

 

[Drtooth]

No no no. There's a Kay Jewelers commercial where a documentary film maker narrates how penguins give pebbles to female penguins they want to mate with (like that horrible 1990's animated movie), but the "smart" penguin gives her a diamond. It's pretty classless, and penguin documentaries are passe as heck, so it's not even culturally relevant.

I've never been a fan of love equals shiny, expensive thing.

But I saw that game commercial. Nothing bad about it other than being slightly annoying. Gotta admit, I haven't seen any toy commercials other than those minute long jingle overdose ads for mail away plush toys for a while.