Monday, February 4, 2019

THE 2019 SUPER BOWL BLIPVERTS (PART ONE)


Well, Super Bowl 53 is over and the New England Patriots won!  (I’m a New Englander; sorry if my gloating is annoying.)

Now it’s time to play Monday Morning Quarterback and begin the daily look at what was REALLY important from last night’s event – the commercials!

Today we’ll kick it off with an examination of the Super Bowl’s worst commercial:


I don’t brand it as being the worst because of its impact; there were plenty of others which were very boring and some I couldn’t remember who the sponsor was.  I thought “Chunky Milk” was really funny and most importantly, it has plenty for me to work with as a televisiologist.

I only call it the worst because it's disgusting!  After it aired last night I posted to Facebook that Mint Mobile had just made me lactose intolerant!

So here goes…..

Let’s deal with the “spokesman” first.

Mint Mobile’s minty green Fox is first seen on the computer screen before it escapes the internet aether to become “real” in the live action world.  This isn’t a crossover from the Tooniverse, but if it wanted to live in that alternate TV dimension, it would have fit right in.

Minty Green Fox comes from the dimension of the Interwebz which is usually inhabited by the avatars of the actual humans who created them.  And many of those can easily make the transfer to the living dimension of Toobworld.  At least those are not as noticeable as would be the toonfolk; the human avatars could pass among the “actual” humans as being one of them.  The iMortals who looks like Dennis Haysbert and Dennis Quaid do it all the time.  At least until they began to de-rezz. (Thankfully so, or Toobworld would have seen all of their citizens be replaced by their own creations.)

These type of beings who are computer-generated are classified by Toobworld Central as iMortals once they escape the boundaries of the internet into the “reality” of Toobworld.  Flo and Jamie and other members of the Progressive team are iMortals who look exactly like the "real" people who set them up as their avatars while creating their company computer accounts.  And they have lives within the Interwebz, interacting with other iMortals from other computer programs.  (For instance, Jamie's wife - she's probably from some French corporation's computer system.)


I’m not sure why they’re using a fox as their mascot.  (At least the Car Fax Fox makes sense!)  But at least it’s not another owl.  Owls have been the “spokesmen” for about five different products over the last couple of years.  And we all know that the owls are not what they seem.


To provide an example of what’s not right, the Fox showed the Chunky-Styled Milk blipvert and how the family loved drinking -# er, chewing – it. 

That commercial may have featured human actors; it might even have been produced by humans.  But it’s target audience was a subset of the population in the televersion of the United State – the Tenctonese aliens who found the pleasurable after-effects of drinking spoiled, sour milk to be similar to that of alcohol.

From the opening narration of each episode of ‘Alien Nation’:


"This was the scene in California in California Mojave Desert 5 years ago. The historic 1st view of the Newcomer ship upon its arrival. The ship was a slave ship carrying 250,000 beings, bred to adapt & labor in almost any environment .But they washed ashore on Earth with no way to get back to where they came from. And in the last 5 yrs, the Newcomers have become the latest addition to the population of Los Angeles."  

From Wikipedia:
‘Alien Nation’ is a science fiction police procedural television series in the 'Alien Nation' franchise, adapted from the 1988 movie of the same name,  

The series is set in the near future in the United States. In 1990, a flying saucer crashes in the Mojave Desert containing a race of extraterrestrials, the Tenctonese, escaping from slavery under a cruel Overseer race. They resemble humans but have certain anatomical differences (their erogenous zones are located on their backs and the males are the gender that deliver their babies, once transferred to them from the female via an incubation pod, with reproduction needing a triad of two different male species to each female for pregnancy to be possible) and have been bred with greater physical strength and intelligence. These Newcomers, as they are called, are accepted as the latest immigrants to the U.S. and the series explores issues around their integration into the multicultural society of the U.S.  


This premise could have doomed the series to some other Toobworld, but even though I was an avid fan of ‘Alien Nation’, that too-soon cancellation may have prevented that decision…. Looking at it from a cold televisiological viewpoint.

The series took place in 1995, broadcast in 1990-91.  And after a few TV movie sequels, they have not appeared in the main Toobworld since.  If we had a perfect Toobworld, we would at least have seen them in background shots over the years in other TV shows.  And it wouldn’t even have to be TV series set in the Los Angeles area.  By now, a quarter century since they were last seen in Earth Prime-Time, some of the Tenctonese could have spread across the country, perhaps even migrated to other countries.

Toobworld Central has long had a theory as to where the Tenctonese ended up – off Earth.


In  my theory, UNIT requested help from the Doctor in bringing the “Newcomers” back to their home planet… if they wanted to go.  Most of them did, but even though the TARDIS was bigger on the inside, it still took quite a few trips to get nearly a quarter million aliens back to Tencton.
(I'm sure the Doctor would have done what he could to leave Tencton safe-guarded against any future invasions by the Overseers.)

I’d like to think that maybe a couple hundred did choose to remain behind (just in case another reunion TV movie came about, looking at it from the Trueniverse point of view.)
 

Definitely I’d want the Francisco family and Cathy Frankel to stay behind!


So with that core group of Tenctonese-Americans still around somewhere, companies would know that they would have dietary, recreational, and fashion needs to be addressed.  And then the advertising agencies would come up with the campaigns to sell those products to the No-Longer Newcomers.

Chunky-style milk would have been one of those products.

We’ll keep looking at other Super Bowl 53 blipverts over the next few weeks I think…..
Here's lookin' at you, kid.....  Drink up!


O'BSERVATION:
A very big "Thank you!" to my brother Andrew.  He is the "
qitto playsk'lex" for this article.....

No comments: