Category Archives: commercials

RIPped Hearts

Kobe Bryant death spurs Planters to pause promo of Mr. Peanut funeral ads (CNET)Nancy Drew seemingly has been killed off in a comic, just in time for her 90th birthday (CNN) It probably goes without saying that Wisconsin is football country, and eight days ago I was tempted to tweet a GIF of that one scene from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope after I saw the score of the NFC championship game and realized that the Packers weren’t going to the Super Bowl.…

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Doubling Down on Destruction

Austerity’s Cost: Abandoned Children in Europe (CNBC via yahoo.com) I should have known better than to blog here about how I hadn’t been subjected to much right-wing advertising about the coming election given my position in a “swing state” and the obscene amounts of money likely to be spent on advertising this year. Earlier this week I got hit with the same video seven times in one day from one of those right-wing PACs advocating for debt reduction, recycling the same canards about how the…

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You Can’t Stop Fan-Based Works

Esurance Axes Erin After the Secret Agent Took on an X-Rated Life of Her Own (cbsnews.com) If you’ve never heard of Rule 34, it’s another of those Internet memes. The full text of rule 34 is, “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.” My friend Max C., who first made me aware of this story, pointed out that Erin Esurance may well be the first “casualty” of Rule 34, a character retired because its creators were sick of all the adult spinoffs…

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That Man is an Enabler

Recently one of my friends sent a tweet out, asking what we, her Twitter followers, thought was the greatest television commercial of all time.  As someone who was lucky enough to live through the middle and late 1990s, that last period of popular culture that had so much going for it, my immediate response was the landmark Orlando Jones “Make 7-Up Yours” spots, commercials that endure to this day.  Now that I’ve thought longer about it, though, I think there is one commercial that stands…

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My City for a Decent Cable Company

I’ve written before about how I went to private school with children of the family that runs Toledo’s local cable company, Buckeye Cablesystem. (The same family also owns our local paper, the Toledo Blade.) I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m hardly a fan of Buckeye, particularly when they were slow to add new channels I really wanted in the 1990s (Food Network, ZDTV, MuchMusic, Bravo), which was why I had DirecTV for a few years there. After the fire I didn’t bother…

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