Program scripts from week of November 10, 2013
(Somehow these got skipped. Correcting that now!)
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Commercials on Parade
Feels like I haven’t gone all fan boy on TV commercials for a while. And at the moment there are several out there that I really like. In case you haven’t grasped it yet, I like well made commercials.
There are a couple of alcoholic beverage commercials that recently caught my eye. Alcohol is a product that can’t actually advertise on it’s primary benefit. They can not even wander into the neighborhood of “use our product and we will make you feel goooooooooood”. So it inevitably becomes about other things. For example, and this is not an ad campaign that I much like it just strikes me as odd, the folks at Coors are currently running a campaign that centers on the fact that their beer is really cold. That’s it, just that it’s cold. OK. Meanwhile Budweiser is spending lots of time putting a human face on their corporate beer empire by introducing us to the regional brew masters.
Neither of these are the ads that caught my eye. There are two tequila companies that have chosen almost the exact same approach. To the point that I didn’t realize they were for two different products. 1800 brand has been going with a single spokesman for a while but they were going for a snarky, pseudo cool thing. Now they’ve flipped that and gone with Ray Liotta who basically just challenges the manhood of anyone not drinking tequila. Matching that are the folks at Jose Cuervo with Keifer Sutherland challenging the world to “Have A Story”. Suddenly tequila is a sophisticated yet macho part of life. With, of course, no hint of what else may come with a sample or three.
The other ad that has really jumped out at me is the T-Mobile “Jeremy” campaign. Seems that Jeremy is an young adult son travelling in Europe. Problem is that Jeremy insists on using data as if he were in the United States and the bill on his parent’s plan is getting enormous. We learn all this through videos from Jeremy’s parents as they try to get their sons attention. What really grabs me is that the spots take a fairly nerdy concept (overseas data use) and turn it into something that we can all understand and a situation that makes perfect sense. That’s really advertising writing at it’s best.
Like a good TV series I can hardly wait to find out what’s next.
Having said that I will begin by saying this commentary begins with me going to see a movie. I saw “Ender’s Game” based on the book of the same name by Orson Scott Card. I thought it did an OK job of translating the book, which is a favorite, to the screen. That’s the end of the movie review.
There’s a lot of noise about boycotting the movie because of some really outrageous comments starting with a threat to overthrow the Federal government if Marriage Equality becomes the law of the land to claiming that President Obama is creating a private army to insure that Michelle Obama is the next President of the United States. There are plenty of people that come down on both sides of those issues. Personally I think he’s nuts on these subjects.
But here’s the problem. I also think Orson Scott Card is one of the best science fiction writers of the last 30 years. “Ender’s Game” and its sequel “Speaker for the Dead” are in the top one percent for me.
The question becomes are we really ready to start making media decisions based on the personal lives and opinions of the creators? Are we ready to go all the way with that?
What would that mean? Well, Ernest Hemingway was a drunk and pretty clearly a sexist. Shall we stop reading the works of T.S. Eliot and Roald Dahl for the anti-semitism? And of course that means we stop listening to the operas of Richard Wagner. I’m not much of an opera fan but I’m told his stuff really rocks. And along the way we should probably stop buying Ford vehicles because Henry Ford was an anti-semite too.
Is the dividing line that all those other people are dead? I have many friends in the LGBT community and their supporters. I would never argue with their right NOT to support an author like Orson Scott Card. I’m just wondering where the line actually gets drawn. And why.
Day of the Doctor
So I have to ask. What’s with all the zombies right now? I know it’s not really a new thing any more but it seems like every time I turn around there’s another zombie TV series, movie or book out there. Sundance Channel just debuted the American version of the French hit “The Returned” which offers a different view of the undead than the hugely successful “The Walking Dead” on AMC. It’s clear that zombies have turned the corner on popular culture warm fuzzies. Like vampires before them we’re seeing more zombies that just want to live their lives. Add in fun books like local author Lia Habel’s “Dearly, Departed” and zombies are a whole new thing.
Zombies aren’t new and it’s not their first change in PR image either. Go back before the ‘60s and zombies are almost always shown with some connection with Voodoo. These re-animated corpses got all the creepiness they needed out of being, well, re-animated dead people. They were the slaves of the person who performed the rituals to bring them back. Prior to the late ‘60s and that’s the kind of zombie you’ll see. Check out the undead working for Bela Lugosi in 1932’s “White Zombie”.
All that changes, of course, in 1968. You’ve been waiting for me to get here, right? George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” brings us the zombies we know today. Shuffling, decaying monsters who want braaaaaaaaaaainnss! Since then we’ve pretty much dropped the old school zombie. That is until this new batch of warm, cuddly undead.
So what’s with all the zombies? The learned folk out there who study this kind of thing seem to have come up with a logical sounding explanation. in the 1950s when the world was a scary and unpredictable place the movies were suddenly filled with aliens from outer space. Technology was beginning to suddenly take over more and more of our lives. People found that scary and the movies reflected those feelings. Today we live in an age when it seems like there are a lot of people out there who don’t like us, where there are a lot of “things” being done by science that might be doing strange things to our bodies that we don’t understand. In a time like that what better manifestation of our inner fears than an enemy that can not be reasoned with, who desires nothing more than our grim and frightening death?
So maybe this whole thing of making zombies a little more living friendly is a sign that we’re moving out of that phase of our culture again. Why not? Klaatu and Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” morphed into “My Favorite Martian” in only a decade.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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