Huzzah, it’s football season again! That means I’m spending more time in front of the tube watching a game…and all of the commercials that go with it. By this point in my life I can pretty much tune these out (though I can’t explain these strange cravings for cheese puffs, fast food and big screen TVs), but I make note of commercials I like and those that drive me crazy.
Of the latter, what’s really bugging me lately are the commercials for Ford trucks. Now I like Mike Rowe a lot and his “Dirty Jobs” show is something the kids and I like to catch. He’s a likable enough pitchman for Ford, but if he’s getting paid for every time those commercials run he’s going to have more than enough to tell someone else to do those dirty jobs. Every TV timeout this last weekend featured one of two different Ford truck commercials. I mean it, I started to count on them: a commercial break would occur and I’d think, “Let’s see, last break they showed the one with the truck stopping the cargo plane so that means that this break it will be the one with the truck going through the road course backwards” — and I’d be right! And I hate it when I’m right! (About things like this anyway.) The repetition is enough to make me reject the Flomax commercials because suddenly having to go to the bathroom at every commercial break doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.
This year’s crop of Coors Light commercials with the hokey coach interviews (which I ripped last year) are still annoying, though I’m glad they’ve let poor Bill Walsh rest in peace. The only interest I’ve taken in these is that they fulfilled my prediction of using Denny Green’s infamous “they are who we thought they were” meltdown from last year, but even that just makes me mad to think that he’s still getting paid.
On the “like” side, though, I have to admit to being beguiled by the iPod Nano commercial that features a series of the little video-playing Nanos being lifted off the table like playing cards while showing a music video of a woman in an electric blue jumpsuit. Now I’m not an iPod kind of guy. My lifestyle is not such that I need to have my ears tickled non-stop by some form of musical entertainment. But the little song the woman is singing keeps growing on me, or perhaps it’s the almost laughably simplistic choreography in the video that somehow reminds me of the dance scene in the Charlie Brown Christmas program. I don’t know just what it was, but it drove me to find out who the singer is and the name of the song.
I succeeded:
(If the video doesn’t play on your monitor you can also check it out at this link.)
Her name is Leslie Feist, a Canadian indie-fave and I’ve found a lot of her music on iTunes that I think I’ll be downloading (but for CDs, not an iPod).
Mmmm, catchy. “1,2,3,4, tell me why you love me more…”
Update:
My first impression of the choreography for this video was based on what I could see in the Nano screen in the TV commercial. Looking at it more closely, while the dance moves are simple, the camera-work is very creative and cleverly makes use of perspective – and apparently it’s done in one amazing, continuous take!
