As I’ve spent the afternoon transcribing more letters, and have had the teevee on in the background, I’d like to take a moment to share a few words about commercials.
First, KFC needs to pull the plug on their new “Music to a mother’s ears” ad. It features a family sitting around the dining room table, chowing down on crispy, chickeny goodness. The idea is that A) shutting the hell up is what a mother wants her family to do and B) the noise of people smacking, chewing, and swallowing is preferable to that of normal dinner conversation. Not only is the premise bizarre, but the smacketty-smack sounds of folks eating is sickifying. And, need I add that it’s something that even my uber-lax mother would not have tolerated at the dinner table? Not only is it all sorts of bad manners, but KFC (and Hardee’s) really ought to rethink their plan to entice diners by inducing them to vomit. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like a very good business plan to me.
O ick!
Second, an old anti-smoking commercial is currently being recycled. I don’t know if these are Indiana-specific, or if they’re being run nation-wide, but there’s a whole series of similar ads. This one begins with a music box-like tune tinkling away as a mother straps her young daughter into a car seat. We see the kid sitting in her car seat. Then, the mother gets into the car and the camera pans to the rear-view mirror, where we see the child looking back at us. The expression on the child’s face throughout the commercial is unreal. The first time I saw the ad, I thought it was a PSA about mentally disabled kids. The depiction of the child is so distracting that I have a difficult time even registering that the commercial is about smoking. Now, I assume that they were going for a china doll sort of concept, in order that the viewer understand that the child is helpless; but, they’ve gone too far, making the kid look so vacant and vacuous that the point of the sermonizing is pretty well lost on me.
red paper boat 