Wednesday, March 03, 2004
BUT I LOVE CHEF: (or "Time For Another Space Filler")
When you watch as many cartoons as I do, you see a lot of ads intended for children, and even if you have no children, you just shake your heads in disbelief. I gave a passing glance to the game ads in previous days but the pitches for toys and kid foods like Fruit By The Foot and other consumables which promise a hallucinatory experience (from eating CANDY!) haven't even been touched on.
The current Chef Boyardee ad, for instance, is a genuine head scratcher. You might know the one I'm talking about: the kid tries to drop a can of Boyardee into mom's shopping basket, mom rightly says "We had Chef last night," and the kid's mushmouthed whine causes some type of half-assed miracle where the can follows them home and rolls right into the child's overjoyed lap. At least, that's where I think they were aiming, for reasons I'll be more than happy to bore you with.
We'll start with the little girl, who barely showed a flicker of emotion throughout the whole ad, giving the entire production a muted quality almost unheard of in kidvid ad time. At the moment of truth, when the can rolls up to the kid for the happy reunion, the little girl gives us a small but nervous smile, a genuine sense of unease. Of course, my first thought was "That was the BEST TAKE they could get out of her? Was the casting office closed for the holidays?"
After I ditched those thoughts, my evil imagination kicked in. A few possibilities as to what was going through the kid's head:
--"This isn't Beefaroni! Lousy can..."
--"It's the GHOST OF BOYARDEE, coming to seek vengeance on moms everywhere!"
--and my odds-on favorite, "This can is a sentient lifeform, and now I must open its body and eat its brains."
Well, what would YOU think? Does it make me a social pariah to dwell on these things, or just a miserable failure at finding other hobbies?
When you watch as many cartoons as I do, you see a lot of ads intended for children, and even if you have no children, you just shake your heads in disbelief. I gave a passing glance to the game ads in previous days but the pitches for toys and kid foods like Fruit By The Foot and other consumables which promise a hallucinatory experience (from eating CANDY!) haven't even been touched on.
The current Chef Boyardee ad, for instance, is a genuine head scratcher. You might know the one I'm talking about: the kid tries to drop a can of Boyardee into mom's shopping basket, mom rightly says "We had Chef last night," and the kid's mushmouthed whine causes some type of half-assed miracle where the can follows them home and rolls right into the child's overjoyed lap. At least, that's where I think they were aiming, for reasons I'll be more than happy to bore you with.
We'll start with the little girl, who barely showed a flicker of emotion throughout the whole ad, giving the entire production a muted quality almost unheard of in kidvid ad time. At the moment of truth, when the can rolls up to the kid for the happy reunion, the little girl gives us a small but nervous smile, a genuine sense of unease. Of course, my first thought was "That was the BEST TAKE they could get out of her? Was the casting office closed for the holidays?"
After I ditched those thoughts, my evil imagination kicked in. A few possibilities as to what was going through the kid's head:
--"This isn't Beefaroni! Lousy can..."
--"It's the GHOST OF BOYARDEE, coming to seek vengeance on moms everywhere!"
--and my odds-on favorite, "This can is a sentient lifeform, and now I must open its body and eat its brains."
Well, what would YOU think? Does it make me a social pariah to dwell on these things, or just a miserable failure at finding other hobbies?
|| Eric 4:18 PM#
