Who broke my window?

by Grant Brisbee on Jan 25, 2006 1:45 PM PST in News

I'm incapable of counting to three out loud like a normal person because of a commercial. Instead of, "one...two...three...", I unintentionally say, "one...too-hoooo...thrrrrree." Mr. Owl counted that way every Saturday morning of my pre-adolescent years, and I have no choice but to follow suit. If I'm frantically trying to find something, I might yell out, "Glue! I need glue!", because of a commercial. Just about every one of my close friends would know to shout back, "You're gonna need lots of glue!"

It isn't high science to point out commercials are supposed to rewire your brain. That's their job. The longevity and quality of the things is impossible to predict, though. I'm sure the ad exec for Tootsie Pops didn't pitch his idea like:

There's a cartoon kid and a cartoon owl, and the kid wants to know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. The owl tries to find out, but he can't resist biting down on the thing after two licks. The kid may or may not be wearing clothes. You'll laugh, you'll cry; it'll be remembered for decades.

My work is done here, so I'm going to Bermuda for a few years. If you have any questions, you can call me on my cell phone when it's invented.

Television commercials need to capture your attention, and they have precious few seconds to do it. This means they'll need a whole lot of something to stand out, and they'll have but two senses to work with. Sometimes, the commercial crosses over into entertainment, and there are a few television commercials we not only look forward to, but hold dear to our hearts for whatever reason.

This is so not the case with radio commercials. Baseball is a great radio sport. The pace rarely gets too frenetic to force an abridged description of the action, and it allows the personality of the announcer to shine through. This is why we're so attached to the Hank Greenwalds, Jon Millers, and Bill Kings of the world. We spend hundreds of hours with these voices every year, and we rely on them to recount the details of a game we love.

We also spend multiple hours with the godless advertising that comes between innings. There has never, ever, ever, ever been a radio commercial worth remembering. The initial impulse when a commercial break starts is to tune out. This isn't a trade secret, so with only once sense to work with, the advertisers are forced to come up with something spiritually akin to a car alarm. This is true of all radio commercials, whether it's the "two annoying people pretending to discuss a product" commercial, the "one annoying guy talking at us" commercial, or the "annoying jingle intended to sink its talons into our mushy little brains" commercial. And, make no mistake, those are the only genres of radio commercial.

With a baseball season, you have a rotation of about eight radio commercials for the year. By May, you start to look for Molotov cocktail instructions on Wikipedia. This whole post is stemming from my inability to get an Outback Steakhouse radio jingle out of my head today, and it's a jingle from about seven years ago. So I want this thread to be a cathartic expulsion of the radio commercial demons. I want to scrub the memories from my system, and never again think of the lyric, "Kangaroo can survive in the desert... How 'bout you?" Post the radio spots you've been scarred by, and together we can make a difference. My top three:

United Rentals used to have a spokescharacter who went by the name of Alex Dween. He was "the man who rrrrents everything", and his shtick was to act like a Rocky & Bullwinkle character on acid. If needed to rent a bulldozer to move a stalled bus off of a blood relative, I'd go out of state to avoid United Rentals specifically because of those commercials .
Your back is consistently stiff, so you go out to buy a new mattress. You might spend a pretty penny on it, but, hey, it's going to last you for a decade. You deserve to treat yourself. You get it delivered from Sleep Train, set it up, and lie down on it for the first time. As you close your eyes, you can hear Tom Tolbert whisper in your ear:
You like that? You like this mattress? I bet you do. Yeah, I told you you'd like it. You love the mattress. I told you Tommy was going to make things right. Mmm. That's a nice mattress. Would Tommy lie to you? Yeah, that's right. Mmmm."
I'm not asking for you to boycott Sleep Train, but I'm not not asking, either.
Any commercial with that voice. You know the voice. It's been about a decade:
Here's something to do with baseball: something to do with baseball. That's supreme. You know what else is supreme? Chevron, with Techron Supreme. Enjoy this commercial, jackass, because you're going to hear some variation of it seventeen times a day for the next six months. See you in hell.

Sometimes it's helpful to remember the bad when you don't have access to the good. There are some things about baseball season I don't miss.

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