Ads Garfield Hated

A great American city is destroyed. Hey, let's sell cars!

Some blog commenters actually defended Ford's gross exploitation of post-Katrina New Orleans, featuring Harry Connick Jr., on the basis of all the company and its employees did to help after the hurricane. So what? Charity is charity. It is not a licensing deal.

Is the perfect woman "yay high with a flat head to rest your beer on"? No, she is a grinding roboto-slut with a beer tap where her reproductive system should be. No category has abused women quite like beer, but no commercial has reduced them to a plumbing fixture quite like this.

Digital effects and God-knows-what were used to reanimate the late nerd corn-popper to produce one of the creepiest commercial characters ever made: Orville Deadenbacher, advertising's first pitch -zombie. Like the Haggar smeared-feces atrocity from late '06, the (shall we say) short-lived Orville stunt was client-sponsored self-indulgence from an agency too impressed with its own press clippings.

Two mechanics get kissing close while sharing a candy bar and recoil in disgust. Here's the three problems with homophobia gags on the Super Bowl: 1) to a big part of the audience, gross 2) snack-relevant to nobody, 3) duh, homophobic. This one got pulled right after the game.

Golly, who doesn't like to turn on the big game to see a laid-off autoworker contemplating suicide? The Super Bowl ad was supposed to highlight how everybody at GM is quality-obsessed. Instead, it showed that everybody at GM, including robots, fears for their jobs.

Women caregivers are so underappreciated. They take care of the kids. They take care of feeble old Mom. They turn rainbows into hair ribbons and fallow meadows into old-growth playgrounds. Then they go to their jobs as CVS pharmacists, where they have plenty of care left over to lavish on you. Because CVS cares sooo much more than those Walgreens scum. Excuse me, ma'am, do you sell ipecac?

Stone-chiseled, cotton-clad WASPs at leisure, sailing and lobster eating and tennis watching, because they know what the (ultra-expensive) simple pleasures are and so do you. Because you are sophisticated. You are cultivated. You are rarified. You are Grey Goose material. Excuse me, I really need that ipecac.

Our own agencies are busy crafting suicidal-robot gags, so maybe we'd better use an idea from college students for our HHR jalopy. Some sort of mob scene? Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if anyone can follow the premise. Doesn't matter if anyone can see the vehicle. It's "consumer-generated." It's a trend. The groovy young kids will just love it!

Garrison Keillor voiceover? Check. Extravagant effects? World's best independent agency? Check. Warm, engaging, persuasive and fun? No, not that. Not hardly. This nightmarish vignette of wind-tunnel torture caught on film is horrible to watch. Its only redeeming quality is the title, "Hondamentalism." Good concept. Maybe they could do an ad about it.

Speaking of filming surreal and intense experiences, Wrigley compares chewing its new gum to freefall, full-body BB massages and being shot out of a gigantic pneumatic gun. This turns out to be a slight exaggeration. The 5 experience is a lot more like chewing a stick of gum.