In the comments section of an earlier post, someboy mentioned Burger King commercials, which reminded me that a friend and I were talking about TV commercials that really creep us out. Four top the list.
1. The Burger King commercial where the guy wakes up next to the king. No homophobia here -- my friend is a gal, and it disturbs her even more than it does me. I bet it gives many women scary memories of guys they've woken up next to.
2. The talking babies, complete with moving mouths. Maybe this one freaked a lot of people out, because I haven't seen it in a while. It is just unnatural -- I had visions of "Village of the Damned," all those scary kids with the glowing eyes.
3. The one that takes real people talking and makes it look like they are illustrations. I don't know what bothers me about this one, but it does.
4. (Currently THE creepiest): The walking scissors that keep opening and closing. People who encounter them are downright giddy and start throwing their credit cards into them. They should be running away screaming, "Oh God, help us, the scisssors have come to life!"
Anybody got a fifth to round out the list?
Comments
The breath-freshening gum commercial that revolves around an armed bank robbery leaps to mind....in fact that same product (which I honestly cannot name - which says that they failed in their primary mission) has another commercial where a woman in an office grabs a potted plant and dumps all the dirt into her mouth....at the end, her face is smeared with mud, but her pearly white teeth continue to shine (and I say to my wife "she'll get worms")
and I cannot stand the "That's AllState's stand!" commercials. I know several people who have had horrible experiences with that insurance company, when one of their insured people run into someone else! Their "stand" invariably reduces to "Drop dead"
I agree with the Allstate commercials...although I love Dennis Haysbert's work dearly in The Unit, I abhore the fact that this insurance company WILL drop you faster than a baked potato under many conditions (unless they changed a lot of their policy).
One commercial that bothers me is the VW commercials where the people are chatting while riding along...then BAM!
They're T-boned at an intersection...(touts the survivability in a volkswagen w/ side airbags)...
Right up there with the Allstate commercials.
We have to attempt to AVOID such incidents every day when behind the wheel...we don't need constant "reminders" of what CAN happen. Talk about waking up in a cold sweat!
B.G.
The thing that I don't like about the scissors commercial is that I just don't get it. Sorry to be an idiot, but I've seen that commercial several times and it still doesn't make sense to me.
I do not have a new one to add- but I really HATE the Burger King commercials.
"THE KING" Mascot is just scary!
I find the little girl in the volvo ad that won't shut the &%$# up to be extremely annoying.
That Volvo ad makes me hit 'mute' only because of the cloying nanny-woman voice-over ("Tell uuuusss")
Speaking of commercials that disappeared in a heartbeat, I recall the Burger King spot in which the disgraced Omarosa from "The Apprentice" showed up as if she were making a comeback. Obviously BK miscalculated the seriousness of her disrepute. That's when I found out a customer service number for BK-corporate is VERY hard to find. The commercial went away anyhow, so somebody got through.
To help finish off a slow night on the board, let me add that the creepiest commercials, to me, are the ones with the jingles that make your skin crawl.
I have the impression that these are mostly locally produced, and they invariably feature some (deservedly) anonymous singer who is pretending to sing a throat-gagged, studio-stifled version of some scruffy lead singer's rock'n'roll style. It never works, and there is no style. There is only the parody.
"Get In and Go!" is one of the current hair-raising entries in this anti-competition, in my opinion. You can surely name entries of comparable caliber without my help -- these badly directed commercials (but slightly better than 10-20 years ago) are almost instantly recognizable as regional productions, all equally rudimentary and equally grating on the nerves.
The latest entry on my dud list is the folk song being used to hawk the virtues of Indiana. The arrangement is a smidge above average, BUT -- its small virtues are obliterated by the fact that somebody mastered the audio at two or three times the volume of everything else on your TV.
So, you'll be able to tell the folks at home
-- right after you leap across your family room to Mute the heart-stopping, sphynctah-puckering, rage-inducing, jagged bolt of guitar whanging --
that "hey, this is for sure the ad that the guy on Leo's blog warned us about! Man, he was waaaay too kind!!"
Wonder why they haven't re-mastered this particular little shockathon yet..... Ran out of money for studio time?
Creepy is as creepy does. These don't pleeze. For a commercial, that's largely fatal.