Taco Bell Talking LionsSuper Bowl XLI Commercial

This year there must have been some traveling CGI salesman who convinced all the advertisers that talking animals was going to be the “in” thing during the Super Bowl.

I already took a look at Bud Light’s talking gorillas. They are rejoined by several other enchanted animals, first up are the Taco Bell lions.

For a Taco Bell commercial, this is a little above average. For commercials in general, it’s below average. (But it’s Taco Bell, who cares.

The effects on the lions, similar to the CGI Bud Light gorillas, are a little more sophisticated than the little wiggling mouths that used to adorn all the special effects talking beasties. You have some better mouth / eye movements, and cohesive facial reactions. Despite all this the lions, like the gorillas, come off soulless and fake. I agree with Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, who preaches that “CGI” is not a verb. Computer graphics isn’t a magic wand that will make a production look awesome, or replace the need for brick-and-mortar special effects.

Blockbuster Mouse ClickingSuper Bowl XLI Commercial

That said, I’d much rather see the entire animal stylized in CGI, as we see in this commercial for Blockbusters. Some hamsters or something are clicking on a mouse and torturing it to death. It might actually die off screen, I don’t know, I had the sound turned down.

This spot was much funnier and engaging to me than the gorillas or lions, and the animals aren’t presented as completely photo-realistic. The ability to completely control the characters and breathe life into them makes up for the “hey that’s a real lion talking” wow factor.

Comcast Talking TurtlesSuper Bowl XLI Commercial

Normally I’d advocate using puppetry over CGI wherever possible. Until I saw this stinker from the current Comcast campaign.

The talking turtles kind of look like petrified stool samples, and I found myself generally annoyed by this spot. Maybe by the time I saw it I was so fed up with talking animals this one just didn’t stand a chance.

I think they spent four dollars making these puppets. And part of their budget went into buying a three-dollar cup of Starbucks coffee. They must have made one puppet and split-screened it to save money. Anyway, whatever, I am so over the talking turtles. They are dead to me.

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.

Read my lips

Even for a Taco Bell commercial, this is pretty bad. Taco Bell has a handful of these running right now for their Caesar burrito thingy, and they are all equally horrendous, and I get that vague feeling I’m watching a Saved by the Bell rerun. I think what pushes them over the top is that in each of them some there’s some horrible forced laughter at someone’s performance that is no way funny at all, again reminiscent of Saved by the Bell.

My head hurts so there’s no funny caption

There’s something about Taco Bell commercials that make them extra annoying without a lot of apparent effort on their part. In their latest product launch, they have utilized the phrase “good to go” to describe the fucking delicious “Crunch Wrap Supreme”.

I’m not sure if they are presenting the “good to go” product booth character as someone who is supposed to be annoying, but the end result is the whole spot being irritating. I feel more like I’m watching some inside joke that only two writers are laughing their asses off at. Is this guy supposed to be funny because he’s so uncharismatic? Do a lot of people go to technology conventions and have the ability to relate to this interaction?

I scale Taco Bell commercials on a scale of zero to one. This one scores a zero. Taco Bell, you may retake this commercial pass/fail next semester if you want to salvage your grade point average.

I am not a student of body language but I think it’s pretty obvious from the way these two are sitting that they are brother and sister

This one is a quickie. Um no pun intended. Ok I lied, that is a hilarious pun.

Most of this commercial is “eaten up” by an actual ad for the product they are selling. Similar to the previous two ads from the same fast food chain, though, the presence of both Taco Bell food and raunchy sexual innuendo make for an “odd couple”. Get it? An odd couple.

So great. I have to imagine these two doing it while they still chew and swallow Taco Bell. What would happen if I were eating a Monterey Spicy Chicken Whatever in the Taco Bell store and I met eyes with a large hairy trucker? What then?

What then would probably be the fourth and final installment of this advertising campaign if the people running this campaign had their way. I don’t think they’ve had sex in their lives. If they had they would know that amorous feelings feel nothing like Taco Bell sludging its way into your belly and nether-regions.

Since there isn’t much else to write about I guess I’ll fill some space with a fan fiction about these two people. Then maybe I’ll photoshop them doing it in my free time.

Montery Matchup, Chapter One: Love at First Bite

Max had lived next door to Terry for months, but she never could seem to get his attention. Was he blind? What did she need to do to get her to notice that her breasts heaved for him and only him?

One day by happenstance Max knocked on the door to see if Terry’s cable had gone out. “No,” she said, “it’s still on.”

“Oh,” Bill answered. Oops I mean Max. Max answered. “My cable modem went out and I thought maybe it was the cable. I don’t have cable tv so I thought I’d just check but maybe it’s my router or just temporary packet loss or something and blah blah blah!” Stop talking and notice that my bossoms heave for you, Bill! I mean Max!

I am multifaceted and made this image in under nine hours

Max was turning tail back to his rot gut of an apartment when Terry made one last desperate attempt. “Say I got too much Taco Bell and if you hadn’t eaten anything, I mean it’s just Taco Bell I could just throw it out or fertilize my flowerbox with it..but you know if you were hungry or something I might as well..” And his eyes lit up! He was on the hook. But could Terry reel him in?

Stay tuned for Chapter 2! If you kept reading this long, watch the video again already, you obviously have a lot of time on your hands.