The Ghost of Popcorn Past

WHAT THE BUTTERY FUCK IS UP WITH THE REANIMATED CORPSE OF ORVILLE REDENBACHER?!

At first they were content with doctoring his old commercials to change the product packaging, but now I swear they're cutting his face out and pasting it onto some sort of unholy CGI Jar-Jar thing and making him listen to iPods and dance around. Except it doesn't work right, so it looks like he's stretched out taut on a mesh skeleton, and his forehead is going to split open if he doesn't come through the TV and disembowel you first.



Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?!

He's disturbing! I don't want to buy popcorn from him, I want to run screaming, grab a shotgun, and shoot him in his zombie face before he eats my brains! Why are they doing this to poor Orville Deadenbacher? Oh, the humanity. Oh, the popcornity!

As Seen on Billboards

This being a city with no advertising restrictions or zoning laws, you get a lot of interesting things plastered on large signs everywhere you look. Nevermind the terror of giant Alan Thickes telling me where to buy timeshares, or close-ups of womens' asses promoting strip clubs. Those at least make sense to me. These do not...

First up, one for Peep One Erotic Drink. What makes it erotic? Let's ask the poorly-translated website!

"The drink innovation peep one represents a novelty on the market. Otherwise, there is no equivalent drink neither in direction nor in product quality. peep one is clearly differentiated from the traditional Energy drinks on account of his effect, contents cloths and the product statement."

"It closes a gap at the market concerning the combination of eroticizing and beverage innovations stimulating at the same time. The stimulating effect is to be divined during the first odour test already. Odour is harmonious, combined without blemish tones and synthetic taste analogies with purely natural associations. Through the balanced game of acid and sweetness, the request for further pleasure grows up very fast."

Now we know. Are you turned on yet? Apparently it contains New Zealand stag horn. "The New Zealand stag horn which is employed in peep one the natives ascribe a strong positive effect, potence increasing clearly and stimulating sexually." I, for one, am shocked they've managed to find an ingredient scarier than anything in Mountain Dew.

Another billboard was for La Preciosa, a Mexican radio station here in town. Click on the link and check out their Flash banner at the top of the page. See the mustachioed guy in the bullfighter costume? He features prominently on their multiple billboards throughout the city. Can anyone familiar with Hispanic culture answer me this? Is he a major player in the Latin community, their equivalent of say, Madonna or K-Fed? Do people cling to his every sombreroed adventure, and do the matador suit and mustache speak volumes about his masculinity and rugged virility? Somebody, fill me in!

The March of Progress

You know those Breathe-Right nasal strips, the little rigid band-aids you apply to your nose to prevent snoring? Well, apparently that's not enough relief for some people, and so the good folks at Breathe-Right now offer a gargle that "lubricates your throat" to allow air to pass through more easily before bedtime.

Lubricated throats?! Oh brave new world, with such possibilities in it!

Commemorative Erection

I saw yet another ad for those 5th anniversary 9/11 commemorative coins. You know, the ones with the separating pop-up towers, that basically give your non-legal tender collectible the ability to sport an erection?

The ad boasts that the silver used in the coin came from vaults beneath the World Trade Center. If you don't act now, the limited supply of leftover plundered silver could run out, and then you'll have to settle for metals that haven't been dusted with burnt remains.

Question. Don't the original owners of the silver (or their heirs) still have a right to it? Just because the building it was in was destroyed, does the ownership of the silver automatically switch to the National Collector's Mint (not affiliated with, endorsed, or licensed by the U.S. Mint)? Or is finder's keepers, and whoever goes over it with a metal detector ("dad had one, but it wasn't like this"!) first can claim it?

What if the Starship Enterprise crashed? Would the metal from the hull belong to Starfleet, or would the Galactic Collector's Mint be able to scrap it for use in commemorative pewter models?

Triumph of the Freaks

Am I the only one who noticed that Dove is using a model with a tattoo for their latest lotion ad? As part of their Campaign for Real Beauty, they're supposedly using women who look more like everyday people made out of flesh and piercings. But is a chick with a simple, elegant Celtic tattoo centered square on her back really representative of the "freak" portion of the market?

Where are the women with those contact lenses that make your eyes look like a cat's? Where are the women with Darth Maul facial tattoos, or suspension marks on their backs? Where are the women with ornamental chains running through their labia? Do they not need moisturized? I will gladly volunteer to moisturize them should it help them break through the glass barrier of the television screen.

"That was when I had the idea to attack 21st.com..."

I find myself more than a little bothered by the space-time continuum paradoxes I keep seeing in the ads for 21st.com. I'm not even sure what it is that 21st.com actually sells/does/claims, since I'm too angered by the lapses in logic I keep finding to notice, and I'm not about to go look it up. Let's just assume they kill kittens, okay?

Anyway, let me cite examples for you, gentle readers, so as to rile you up as well. First up, we have an ad that purports to show a guy in 1985, stranded on a desert highway where his car has broken down. Inbred, ass-raping hicks pull up and answer his pleas for assistance the only way they know how. Cut to the present, and our victim is explaining how that night gave him the idea for 21st.com. Except he's still freshly-bruised, injured, and in a cast. Are to understand that he was so severely beaten by the repressed homosexual thugs that 21 years of healing haven't helped? Is the "21st" in honor of the 21 years that it took for him to recover enough to star in a crappy flashback ad?

Here's another. A pregnant woman in 1986 has some sort of issue, and then we see her in 2006 explaining that she had the idea for 21st.com that day. Let's put aside the fact that Ass Rape Man(tm) says that he was the real founder of the company. Her child is still a tiny newborn when we see her in the present! Has she had more kids since then, and the current one stoked her memory of the first? Or has the child not experienced a singular cell division since its birth?

There's another I've only seen once, set in the relatively recent 1990's, wherein another woman says that she founded the company in 1996. But a simple trip through the Wayback Machine shows their site didn't exist back then, and the actual company was founded in 1958. LIES! ALL LIES!

Why does a flashback have to go back twenty years if the world of two decades ago looks exactly the same as the world of twenty minutes ago, down to the same, unaged characters?! Why are there at least three deluded individuals claiming they founded the company, apparently in parallel universes to our own?! Why are large ads for 21st.com visible on the walls in years when the internet as we know it didn't even exist yet?!

I feel dirty I'm even mentioning the company's site, because it's helping these idiots in some small manner through free publicity. Promise me you won't go look anything up or buy the dead kittens or whatever they're hocking. Can you do that for me?

We Be Jammin!

Is the word "jammin'" back? There's a commercial (one of those for the Philly cream cheese where you're not supposed to be creeped out by the fact that the hot chick angels in it are in fact dead- probably from heroin overdoses or something) where one clumsy angel drops her jelly-covered bagel onto another angel's cheese-covered bagel. Like peanut butter combined with chocolate, an unholy fornication results. The angel is probably banished from heaven later, but we don't see this. Instead, we cut to a narrator informing us that new "Jammin' Swirls" are now available.

Yes, the mixing of jelly and cream cheese in one convenient plastic bowl is enough to merit the adjective jammin'.

The only other time I've heard "jammin'" in popular usage is in the musical works of Bob Marley.

Marley: Hey, mon! You got commercial distribution in my traditional reggae!
Music Exec: Hey! You got traditional reggae in my commercial distribution!
Marley: Jammin'!

Bowling for Colon-bine

I'm disturbed, deeply, by the new fad of mixing together everything on your menu in a bowl. When Taco Bell first came up with the idea, I cringed. But then I realized that everything they make is the same five ingredients recombined in different ratios. Doing away with the tortilla shell and just tossing everything together in a bowl seemed like a logical, if icky, next step. Besides, stoners don't care how it looks. They care if it tastes like cheese.

Now, corporate sister KFC has picked up on the idea. Witness their new commercial. Hungry stoner who's probably 30 and yet never held a real job walks into a KFC. He wants... everything on the menu. Together. At once. Luckily, the overeager woman at the counter is ready to give it to him. Barely able to hold back her moans of pleasure, she speaks of a bowl filled to the brim with artificial mashed potatoes, corn, popcorn chicken and cheese mixed together. She asks if he wants gravy poured over the whole thing. Somehow, she manages not to ask if he'd like to contribute his own semen before erupting into an orgasm of her own. Because we all know women everywhere are turned to jelly at the prospect of a go-nowhere loser with gravy-tainted fingers gorging himself at a miniature trough.

I was going to try to think of a potential future bowl development, which would take the idea to its absurd conclusion. But I think this is the absurd conclusion. It can't possibly get worse than gravy, cheese, watery canned corn, chicken soaked in eleven herbs and spices, and whatever the "potatoes" are really made of, all unified into an unholy shepherd's pie of angina.

Oh wait- it can. Have it served up by a woman so into the concept that she's visualizing the customer rubbing the gravy into his nipples.

Yep, it just got much, much worse.