My current favorite is the spot (you can watch it on Windows) in which the haunted-looking Eastern European dreamer-inventor – I don't know where they found this guy who looks malnourished by longing, worn down by hoping against hope, as most Eastern Europeans did in, say, about 1985 – leaps from a bridge over a river with white wings on his arms, watched by a crowd of skeptical but credulous peasants. For a moment, his sad face burns with joy – "Ha HA! I can fly!!!" is what you know he's saying in, probably, Polish (a commenter says it's Czech), and the murmur, "He can fly!" runs through the crowd. Then one shrewd old man says softly, "But he can't swim!" and turns and walks off the bridge as the dreamer unhurriedly loses altitude and glides to a splashdown.
It's a Travelers' Insurance ad, but it has the force of a fairy tale.
I'd be willing to bet the same director made the Microsoft ad in which a tentative, yet intrepid, American business traveler practices saying "Stradsdvytye!" in Russian with his cabdriver as they drive through disconsolate gray streets, can't quite get it right, but by the time he arrives at the company with which he's to do business, has mastered it so misleadingly completely that all the office personnel start babbling away to him in Russian. Only when they sit him down at a terminal with "Vindows" do they suddenly have a common language.
Whoever this director is – is he a Russian or Eastern European immigrant himself? – he captures the plaintive quality that makes the stagnant backwaters of bureaucracy in those countries somehow universally poignant, melancholy, and endearing compared to Dilbert's sterile cubicle. This nebbishy but soulful East Bloc sensibility – the polar opposite of the Bank of Scotland's image – is a rich contribution to the mix of American culture at a time when we are emerging from our go-go national adolescence into a more rueful, resigned maturity, realizing the nearly inevitable human corollary to "Make it happen!" is "...and screw it up."
Article comments
1 - Dave
The new Jello commercial jingle is the worst, most annoying thing I've ever heard. It's flat-out horrible. I am actively going out of my way to make sure that I am not unconsciously affected by it towards Jello: I'm not buying their Jello, or their pudding, or their ice cream treats, or anything. I will encourage my friends not to do so by encouraging them to buy other brands so that I don't give Jello the name recognition that the discussion would give. Am I silly? Perhaps. I love some commercials to the point that I honestly never tire of them (like the "Unbreak my Heart" credit card protection commercial), but I could not sit through a single watching of that damned Jello jingle.
2 - amba
See? You either love it or you hate it.
3 - Nancy
One of the best ads I ever saw was ages ago for Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom", featuring a kitten playing with a tiny rubber ball, then cutting to a lion playing with a beachball - which he catches and it suddenly disappears, leaving the lion sniffing forlornly at the shreds of the beachball.
In Europe, do car ads feature announcers who use that assinine hyper-excited shouting voice as if they're about to have hysterics over whatever gas guzzler it is they're trying to unload? Almost all of them do it here in the US, and it just sets my teeth ON EDGE-! And they all scream, "HURRY-! Call NOW-!" Yuh, right. I'm gonna race down there & buy your stupid cars. I HATE those ads. A pox on all of them.
4 - Meagan
i love/hate the jingle. its so cute but gets suck in your head too easily.. i just cant get enough of it tho. and now its suck in my head! curse you jello jingle why must you be so cute!!!!!!!
hahahahaha