...When All is Said and Dunn

What is wrong with the people in the television advertising industry? I know this is not new territory for me to be writing about, but sometimes once is not enough. Hell, sometimes 20 times is not enough. This is a little lesson I learned from being subjected to some of the most mind-numbingly bad commercials over and over again. Most of them just recently.

Oh where to begin? There are just so many to choose from. With all the channel surfing I do, I expose myself to so many including Spanish, Chinese, Armenian, Japanese, and Korean stations. And even though I don't speak any of those languages, I occasionally stop when something looks interesting and I try to figure out what's going on.

A lot of times while watching one of these, it's more like slamming on the brakes in my car when I see one of their amateur commercials. You know the ones, they're done by someone with a sub-standard video camera, an announcer who has a voice that could shatter glass, and they look like they were directed by a chimpanzee. I sit there with my mouth open staring in disbelief at the incredibly poor quality of the production. I shake my head at the notion that the advertiser paid for this and thought it was good enough to put on the air. If it were my business, besides not paying whoever made them, I would sue them for portraying my business in such a negative light.

Now if you don't watch cable, I might lose you here for a second, but please stay with me. Two of the absolute worst and misleading commercials are for a couple of local places. One is a restaurant/club called Pleasures. When watching the commercial for the first time, you are under the impression that this is a typical club with billiard tables and a restaurant. The clientele they are attempting to solicit are couples who are looking for a place to go for an all-in-one-night's worth of entertainment, food, drinks, and billiards. But when they show the cozy couple having a romantic dinner, and you look closely in the background, you can see the legs of a female dancer up on a stage doing an undulating dance.

What this place really is, by their own description when I called them, is a “bikini bar”. That means while you are attempting to eat, you have girls in bikinis dancing continuously. If there was ever a place a couple should not go to, it's this place. What a recipe for disaster it would be for the average Joe to see this commercial, take it at face value and bring in his wife for a romantic dinner. Can you imagine him trying to keep his eye on his plate, and on his wife, while a girl in a bikini is doing a sexy dance five feet away? Yeah that's a good way to test a relationship, if you're a masochist.

The next one, for a place called The Sound Zone, is just plain goofy. It plays to those people we all love so much, those individuals that have sound systems installed in their cars that could double as the sound system at the Staples Center. Since most of these individuals have just left puberty, the guys who produced this commercial have a rather sleazy looking girl in a bright red bikini in every other shot. By the end of the commercial she is casually sitting, in her bikini, in the showroom engaging in idle conversation with a supposed customer. I'm sure she's there right now so all you guys better rush on over there before she leaves. Yeah right.

That's just a sample of the commercials on the cable channels, and frankly, we probably expect them to be low budget. But what about the mainstream fare? The big bucks companies that are shelling out millions for a “high quality” product. Some are more annoying than anything that Acme's Cut-Rate Commercials could conceive of.

Let's talk about the incredibly irritating and tasteless Carl's Jr. commercials. With each one I see I am more and more appalled by the classless buffoons that “star” in them and the morons who produce them. Each one is an exercise in how not to eat a hamburger, or anything else for that matter. The last two in their continuing series on how to gross out people around you are particularly offensive.

First, the guy who decides to eat his burger while at the Laundromat is nothing more than a pig. My God, the guy takes off his soiled tennis shoe and sniffs it before he puts it in the washing machine. He then proceeds to eat his burger with all the grace of a vulture devouring a rotting carcass of a zebra. Up comes their bizarre new slogan “Don't bother me…. I'm eating.” Don't bother you? Man, if I saw that guy eating like that I would do everything in my power to get as far away from him as possible.

The second and newest one from Carl's Jr. is this weird looking girl who is supposedly studying in the city library when she decides to have a bite to eat. She just happens to have a chicken sandwich and a jumbo size soda in her purse.

She whips those bad boys out and starts to chow down. Obviously her parents never told her about chewing with her mouth closed. And with a complete disregard for all the other patrons in the library, she chews at a volume that would raise the dead, and maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls. She also never learned the part about swallowing what's in your mouth before shoving more in.

In the final shot, this girl looks more like a chipmunk than a human being. If I were in that library I would find the biggest dictionary in the place, sneak up behind her, and smack her up side the head.

Finally, on the just plain irritating front, the advertising agency that came up with the new campaign for The Gap should never be allowed to advertise anything ever again. I can't decide which one is worse. The ugly looking girl who thinks she's pretty hawking the Capri pants or the pseudo West Side Story dance number trying to get you to buy khaki pants. Now I like musical theatre as much as anyone, but not in between segments of a dramatic series like ER or NYPD Blue and not 10 times in an hour. Every time one of those commercials comes on I reach for the remote or run screaming from the room. The guys who came up with these two ought to be trampled by a herd of tap dancers in high heels.

I wish I could relegate my viewing to only stations without commercials or watch nothing but movies, but as we all know, that's not a reality. While the characters in these commercials may not be real, life sometimes imitates art. I just don't want it imitating commercial art.