Let’s edit her dancing with a vacuum cleaner now

Once in a while, a commercial comes along that’s so gay, it’s too gay for even any gay man to stomach. It’s off the gaydometer.

In this commercial for The Gap, a company struggling with its has-been status, we see a ressurected Audrey Hepburn dancing around in a fit of blasé split-screenery. Not only is the idea of animating actors from old movies done to death, there’s nothing new and original here. It looks like a poor imitation of an iPod commercial.

This concept, parsing an actor a major shareholder had a hard-on for, and inserting him or her into what the decision makers understands to be a “hip” setting, is old and done to death, just like The Gap. Even the idea of being disgusted by a dead celebrity being resurrected to hawk popular culture garbage is old and done. Let me travel back to the days when I could see a second-circuit showing of Forest Gump in the dollar theater and maybe I’ll be impressed / disgusted by this commercial.

In a way it does embody the slumping, once great clothing store outlet. Instead of “dead man walking,” it’s “dead hipster dancing.”

I’m ready to face Monday now, girlfriend!

And in a rare, double-whammy post, I’d like to drag down this ad for Starbucks’ Diabetes in a Can into dancer’s hell.

First of all: shut up. Stop dancing. It’s too early for dancing.

Coffee and sugar only get a normal person back to normal. This is because we’re all addicted to it. If you feel like dancing after drinking coffee at seven in the morning, you’re a newbie, you’re a Sunday driver, you’re a day player, the only night you go to the bars is St. Patrick’s Day and when you do you pretend like you know what you’re doing.

Drink your coffee and shut the hell up. God get away from me. Don’t even talk to me until after noon. I heard you and the crowd following you from a block on your way to the office, just dancing it up.

This ad is very similar, but still a far cry from the “Glen” commercial for the same drinks, which I actually did like. The Glen spot is a little more tongue-in-cheek, and it doesn’t overstate the influence of a small amount of coffee into a normal human system. For Glen, a Doubleshot tells him he might one day be supervisor. Ok, fair enough. In this new dancefest, a Doubleshot means you will be successful TODAY. Bam. No questions asked.

It’s really too much responsibility for one commercial to lay on us after we woke up so late we didn’t have time for a shower, and the drink we grab in lieu of breakfast is maybe as nutritious as two bowls of Count Chocula cereal. No one likes to feel inadequate, and also no one but Drew Carey thinks this kind of dancing belongs on TV. And we all know what happened to him.

Well, he became a big success. I guess that wasn’t a good example. Man I’m so inadequate at this.

Share This