Click for the :30 Glade PlugIn spot @1 MB, Quicktime

The most annoying theme squirming its way through commercials right now is the “oh let’s see what people in the commercial are imagining” theme. It has a few variants, but the gist of it is that there is a cut away to what is totally going on inside the head of someone in the commercial.

It’s supposed to be funny. But it’s not funny. It’s terrible. Even if what they cut to is sort of funny, it doesn’t result in your brain registering humor.

The first one up is this commercial for Glade PlugIns. The link to the video is below the still frame of the totally turned-on woman.

M-m-m-m-mom????

The woman puts the apple pie scented PlugIn in the socket. The man comes in. He flashes back to the only woman who really loved him: mommy! The woman must snap him out of it. She is a little weirded out.

And none of it is funny. First of all, him remembering his mother baking apple pie isn’t that weird. Second, if he were a little distracted coming in, why would his wife be weirded out? And if his wife were weirded out, why would a woman want to buy a product that makes their husband have delusional episodes about his mommy?

Let’s look at another variant of this chillingly unfunny gimmick.

Click for the 2 :15 Cranium spots @1 MB, Quicktime

In these two Cranium commercials we can see two more flaccid examples of creativity for the price of one.

Technically these are a little different; we’re seeing a flash forward or flash back in time, then we cut to what makes it all make sense and BAMMO, it’s the making of another very unfunny commercial.

In the first spot we see a man having surgery without anesthetic because his side split open. His guts just plain busted out people. Guts everywhere. But what could have caused it?

And we cut to..him and his buds playing the awesomely funny board game Cranium! The only thing this lacked was a hard rock guitar riff to really juice up the punch line. If you look quick, right before it cuts away, you can see the very moment the man realizes his sides have indeed split open. It’s kind of disgusting if you think about it.

It’s happening! It’s happening just like the commercial told me it would! I’m actually pissing my pants! It’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING!

I had to take a little nip from my flask to keep going.

In the second spot, we see a man getting ready for a night with the neighbors (a.k.a. “friends of convenience”) and sadly he must put on rubber underwear. Gosh, that’s terrible. A man his age is already struggling with incontinence? He must have a very strong marriage to survive that.

But no! We see the cause of his pantal urination is merely the radioactively funny game Cranium! Cranium is Crazium. Don’t steal that slogan, Cranium, That’s completely mine. I made it up.

When we see the guy playing Cranium it’s like watching a snuff film where you know the guy trying to jump his bike into the pool from the roof of his parents’ house is going to end up dead before he even gets started. This man is completely going to piss himself. In front of his friends and wife. Nothing will ever be the same after that. Nothing.

Click for the :30 Hallmark spot @1 MB, Quicktime

(Addition as of 3-10-05) How could I have overlooked this Hallmark spot when I first drafted this entry? Finding it in my archives was the reason I made this dang entry for dang’s sake. All of the Hallmark spots are exactly like this. What the person imagining in the spots is not only not funny, it’s not even plausible.

We see (cheaply made over-priced novelty product) entertaining friends/family. We flash back to (consumer) in the Hallmark store thinking about buying it. Terrible! I must have blocked it from my memory.

Click for :30 Best Buy spot @1 MB, Quicktime

And now for the major culprit: Mother Loving Best Buy. As far as I know they are still running their campaign where people run in and totally imagine what can be done with the low-priced high-quality electronics and multimedia. They didn’t invent the “cut away to fantasy land” convention, but they certainly stormed its cockpit and ran it into the ground.

Sadly I only have this one spot archived, and it doesn’t represent the commercials in all their terrible glory. In this one the Best Buy clerk joins in the fantasy, and there actually is sort of a funny point at the end when he snaps her out of it.

If you’ve seen any of the other Best Buy commercials, you know this one spot is as funny as any of them get. For example, a guy imagines buying big speakers. He has a party, gets rowdy, jumps up on a speaker, falls off and hurts himself. We snap back and the clerk says “how about some thinner speakers!” This is exactly the sort of stuff they imagined when they invented comedy back in nineteen twenty-one.

Another Best Buy spot has a dad come in to look at a fridge. “This will be perfect for the chefs,” he says. “CHEFS??” the clerk asks. Then we see imaginary children run in and make a big kitchen mess. We snap out of the new-fridge-smell-induced hallucination, and the clerk helpfully offers: “we sell washers and dryers too!”

The biggest reason a lot of this doesn’t have a chance of being funny is the structure of the “joke” itself. When you cut to something funny, it should be the punch line. And if it’s the punchline, it should be real, not a fantasy. Remember how you felt at the end of Devil’s Advocate or the Dallas TV series when you found out it was all a dream? Or how you stopped paying attention a third of the way through the movie Identity when you found out everyone was just a different personality of the same guy? Or remember how you felt when some jerk on the Internet ruined the end of two movies you hadn’t seen before?

Pictured above: Someone using their imagination!

The point is, a dream sequence takes the punch out of what you see. If it’s not real, who cares? And other people seeing the person’s fantasy is just confusing. Are we seeing things from that person’s perspective? Are they telepathic?

When you see the punch line out of sequence, your brain has to take the time to put everything back in order. By the time it’s done, there isn’t the irreverent release of delightful laughter. Your brain just wants a drink to unwind after all the work your commercial made it do.

The Best Buy commercials in and of themselves are so bad I’ll save them all for their own entry. Or..will I? (Cutaway to a scene of me drinking liquor and playing solitaire) Well, I guess we’ll have to find out. Or..will we? (Cut to us never finding out) I bet we will.

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