Psychically, we’re very well endowed.
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In a continuing celebration of the World Cup, PQH! offers this “Star Wars” and Soccer mash-up. Sure, it’s just an Adidas advertisement, but it’s a hoot for “Star Wars” fans.
The clip, or an edited version thereof, has been appearing after most of the World Cup games on ESPN.
PQH! admits it doesn’t recognize all the humans in the clip, but David Beckham, Mos Def and Snoop Dog are there among Greedo, Han Solo and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
– JOHN SIMCOE
Here in America, we’re at a stop-and-go moment with our switchover to DTV, the effort to end the public use of analog TV signals. Over in the U.K., that change is already taking place on a region-by-region basis.
To herald the U.S. change, American broadcasters recruited the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Pat Sajak and other celebrities to inform the TV-addicted masses of the impending sea-change.
Not so for the Brits. Late last year as their national effort was begining, one network, Channel 4, decided to dig up an old celebrity to get the news out: They found Max Headroom.
For many, Max Headroom was the seemingly computer-generated pitchman for Coca-Cola in the 1980s. In reality, Max was actor Matt Frewer in foam make-up with a cartoon background and an array of quick edits. He already had a lengthy set of credits before he hooked up with Coke.
Before he hit the air in America, Max was a minor sensation in Britain. There, he starred in “The Max Headroom Show.” His success attracted the attention of the folks of Cinemax, who borrowed the character for their own special “Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future.”
From there, Max’s show was moved to ABC and converted into an actual dramatic series. On network TV, it lasted a season.
But Max’s true success was adding fuel to the fire in the Cola Wars. You remember them, right? I lost a brother in the conflict. (Ezekehiel … I’ll never forget!)
Anyway, take a peek at one of those “blipverts” below:
But Max’s popularity didn’t stop there. It wasn’t long before he was all over the place. He showed up in a brilliant “Art of Noise” song, and even got to trade jabs with David Letterman. It was probably Dave’s first ever attempt to interview a TV set …
YouTube has several other snippets that show us Max Headroom’s manic personality. Even his effort to explain the rules of a mail-in contest was pretty funny. In 1987, Max also inspired the only known incident of a completely pirated TV broadcast in the United States.
Back to the future now, and good old Max has been resurrected in a new set of commercials to sell Britain on the digital switchover. You’ll see the years haven’t been kind to him, but his humor lives on.
Are we on the cusp of a total Max revival? Sadly, probably not, but at the very least it might get studio bosses working on a DVD set. … Come on, guys! Catch the Wave!
– JOHN SIMCOE
By MEL BARBER
It’s time once again for that annual advertising rite of passage: Super Bowl Sunday. Whether the game is good or bad, chances are, half the people in the room are watching for the commercials anyway. Expect to see the usual suspects — beer, soda, cars, snack food and movie trailers.
Don’t want to be surprised? Then visit SuperBowl-Ads.com for a roundup of the ads you can expect to see on Sunday. (Check the Tweets for quick links to ads already available online.) Ditto if you want to reminisce with the ads of yesteryear; the site’s video archive goes back to 1998.
After the game, of course, you can find the ads all over the place. Two easy-to-access collections are the YouTube AdBlitz and the MSNBC showdown. Both invite viewers to support their favorite ads with online voting.
Of course, there are two ads that you’ll want to watch as they air — and you’ll need to be prepared. When you run out to the store this weekend to grab last-minute snacks for those six extra people who just RSVP’d, make sure you grab free 3-D glasses at the Pepsi/SoBe display. DreamWorks promises that the Monsters vs. Aliens 3-D commercial will blow your mind by bringing an alien invasion out of your TV and into your living room.
SoBe will join the party with its dancing lizards. (If you’re herpetophobic, offer the 3-D glasses to a fellow viewer to avoid the embarrassing screaming fit.)
Don’t trash the glasses after the game; you’ll need them Monday night for Chuck. And don’t give me that look — if you’re geeky enough to wear 3-D glasses, you’re geeky enough to enjoy watching Chuck.
Whatever happens during the second quarter, keep your glasses handy for the end of it. Post-second-quarter, pre-halftime events — that’s when the 3-D ads will be airing. (FYI, the game broadcast starts at 6 p.m. Sunday on NBC.) Is this really the event that’s going to revolutionize the way we consume television and movies? You won’t know if you don’t watch.
By PETER RAMBO
Microsoft has finally responded to Apple’s “Get a Mac” advertising campaign with one of its own, featuring the comedy due of Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The first ad, running nearly a minute and a half, is more sketch than commercial. If the only point of the ad is to get people to laugh, it works — assuming you’re a fan of Seinfeldian humor. But the comedy serves no purpose beyond that. Seinfeld helps Gates buy shoes at a discount shoe store, and as they’re leaving Seinfeld asks Gates if the people at Microsoft are working on a cake-based computer. Then comes the tagline, “The Future, Delicious,” followed by a Windows logo stamped awkwardly at the end.
Comparing Microsoft’s ad to Apple’s is a lot like comparing their operating systems. Apple’s ads, like its computer, have a distinctive visual style. And Apple’s ads do what people want their computers to do: Jump right to the core of the problem. Macs don’t really do that any better than Windows PCs, but that’s the impression you get from the pacing of the ads. Microsoft’s ad, like its operating system, is bloated. It’s a minute longer than a traditional commercial, and probably 30 seconds longer than it needs to be. It goes on weird tangents (why is the family watching people try on shoes?) and contains no useful information. It gives the impression that the future is coming, and it will be delicious (a word I wouldn’t normally associate with computers). The future is nice, but Microsoft if glossing over its biggest problem, Vista. Vista has a well deserved perception problem. An ad about what it had done to address those problems would go over better than a brief Seinfeld monologue. 
Before watching Microsoft’s ad, I had felt bored by Apple’s. With the arrival of Vista, Apple had stopped trumpeting its pros over Window’s cons. Instead, the ads started just pointing out Vista’s flaws. The complaints may be valid, but they started to feel mean. But after watching the Microsoft ad, I started looking at Apple’s ads on YouTube, which led me to Apple’s overseas ads with different actors. I don’t know who the Japanese guys are, but the UK actors are David Mitchell and Robert Webb. They make That Mitchell and Webb Look, which is my favorite sketch show to tackle the Nazi’s choice of uniform.
By JOHN SIMCOE
It’s hard not to look at any advertisement on TV without a bit of skepticism.
PQH! believes, for example, that OxiClean isn’t just a cleaning product, but sinister magical potion that collects all that grime and deposits it in the beard of spokesman Billy Mays. There is no other way that his facial hair could be that black. It isn’t just black, it’s the absence of all color.
But excuse us, we’re getting off track here. We’re supposed to talking about being mistrusting advertising, and how a group of Australian advertising 
agencies set out to advertise the improbable. This time they weren’t making ads to fool us into buying kangaroo burgers or big can of Foster’s beer, instead they wanted to sell us on child labor, unprovoked wars and global warming.
“Support child labour,” one commercial says, “A little bit of work won’t hurt them.”
Then there’s the new jingle pushing for an invasion of New Zealand: “No planes, no tanks, no navy. Not to want it would be crazy.”
But don’t worry, the preposterous segments aren’t real. The TV ads, all 20 of them, were just a friendly competition between two advertising agencies as they tried to sell the unsellable, but fun nonetheless.
You can watch them all by going here.
By JOHN SIMCOE
Let’s be realistic about it: Funny commercials are a dime a dozen. To catch someone’s eye nowadays, commercials pretty much have to be funny. So it’s no surprise that every once in a while, some TV channel decides to string a bunch of them together, give it a label like “Crazy Commercials from Across the Continents” and throw it in as a filler in the time slot.
And sure, they are funny, but will people sit through an hour of advertising? TBS is certainly hoping they do with “World’s Funniest Commercials,” which premieres tomorrow at 9 p.m.
As you can expect, the special offers up a whirlwind of advertisements that have surprise endings, put people in embarassing situations and offer new takes on old products.
The special itself is pretty much old hat. It even has a pair of annoying hosts who’ve traveled to Paris to introduce segments. No, I can’t figure out why they were in Paris either.
The hosts did succeed in one thing. They pointed me to TBS’s new Web site, veryfunnyads.com, which houses all the commercials featured on the show, plus a bunch of others.
You read it right: You can see all the funny commercials, minus the hosts and minus all the real commercials, without having to schedule your life around the show on the Internet.
What’s the point of even putting it on TV then? Beats me, but it’s obvious that TV executives have a dizzying intellect.
By MEL BARBER
Here it is, the secret shame of this PQH! staffer: I have a horrible memory for music. Absolutely horrible. The kind of horrible that can’t remember a band name for five minutes, let alone a song name or an album title, even if I like the music.
My affliction results in a number of conversations like this:
Me: “Hey, did you see the commercial for that game? They used that song I like.”
Long-Suffering Husband: “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
M: “No, you know the one, it’s like ‘doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo dooooo’. It’s from that movie.”
LSH: “Are you sure you speak English?”
M: “With the rabbit. The scary one with the teeth.”
LSH: “Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Harvey? Bunnicula?”
M: “No, I said the scary one. Creepy-evil-grinning rabbit.” More »
MEL BARBER
Clever, inventive ads are as much a part of Super Bowl tradition as gathering around the big screen with friends and family to cheer on a team, whether your favorite is actually playing or got knocked out before the playoffs even started.
If you missed ‘em last night, you can catch instant replays of the ads at YouTube (taking over from Google Video’s stash last year), CBS, ifilm and SuperBowl Ads. Or wander over to AdBowl and check out five years of stats on favorite Super Bowl commercials broken down by age and sex.
One of my favorites this year wasn’t even technically a Super Bowl ad — it was actually an ad for an ad. On Saturday I caught the CareerBuilder pre-Super Bowl ad — a brief spot that urged viewers to tune into the Super Bowl to see their new marketing campaign (and the end of their monkey business series). It was a neat innovation (I mean, really, who advertises an advertisement?) and a welcome addition to the ad hoopla this year, what with all of the contests for design-your-own Chevy ad or vote-for-your-favorite Doritos ad. More »