I’ve been sitting like this for an hour because of damage in my brain

It seems no advertising power in the known universe is obnoxious enough to unseat Taco Bell from its throne, where it sits as king of all awful television commercials. Looking back we remember some of the older “good to go” spots, and, unfortunately, so did the Taco Bell marketing team as we see in these two thirty-second spots.

There’s a small plus to these newer “good to go” spots, featuring children thrown out of their comfortable home situations by parents using the trademarked and armored-car-protected catch phrase: the underlying idea could actually be kind of funny. This marks a drastic departure from previous content, in which no brain that has communicating hemispheres could imagine a scenario where the situation presented could result in humor. Devastating injuries to the corpus callosum aside, one really has to wonder if the acting and direction was purposely cheesed up, or if this marks the best job they could do in the hilarity department.

In the two spots featured here (there’s at least one other in the trilogy, featuring a long lost twin sister who also has Jedi in her blood and lazy in her bones getting kicked out by her mom) the punch line and acting is too abrupt to really let your mind get around what’s going on. I think I’d like to see the parents a little more angry, and more evidence that the kids are loafers. These kids look 17 or 18, it would be a lot funnier for the “child” to be in his late twenties or early thirties.

The one kid who was told he was “good to go get a job” ends the commercial in a suit, which leads us to believe he actually got a decent office job, and in his teens no less. This ending is too happy, I would have liked to seen him forced to take a fast food job (of course at Taco Bell) and just sitting on his lunch break crying. He would look over at the Crunch Wrap Supreme and the bittersweet memories of delicious crunchiness and homesickness would send him into tears. This is just a rough working script.

I just put this extra picutre here to break up all this boring text. -Alt Text Editor

Likewise in the other spot the kid gets his stuff all nice and packed up and gets called a taxi when he is kicked out of his parents house. I had my stuff thrown on the lawn and I had to hitchhike my way to the methadone clinic. And the rest, as you know, is history.

There’s still some nice spark of quirkiness in these spots that forces me to give them a passing grade, mainly because I’m tired of seeing Taco Bell in my class semester after semester. Good job guys, please never sign up for my recitation again.

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Sing-a Ding-a Doo!

Just when television watchers couldn’t take the endless “Beep Beep” Ford ad deluge anymore, they decided to relent on their advertising schedule. Unfortunately it seems to have been replaced with another non-stop sing-a-thon, with American Idol winner Taylor Hicks singing about how much he loves Ford. Over and over and over again. In certain market areas, this commercial plays continuously, every commercial break, in every available national and local slot. In a small South Carolina town it has been playing non-stop for eight days on the local Fox affiliate.

It isn’t so much that the song-bite is annoying by itself, but once you hear it, say, twice in one commercial break, one starts to wonder if they died while watching an “Everybody Loves Raymond” rerun and woke up in hell without noticing. If Ford is going to buy so many commercial runs, at least they could break it up a bit with, oh I don’t know, at least a single other goddamn commercial that doesn’t have the same song in it.

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