Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

Book Plugs:

Buy 'em and I get
money. I think.
BSD Mall

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005
13:52 - And another thing, consarn it	(top)
Here's something that's been bugging me for a while now: (I don't mean to pick on FoxTrot, but it's as good an example as any.) Now, I don't know if I'm just not watching my TV right, but what shows are they that resemble logo-splattered billboards all half-hour long? Where are these indoctrinating endorsement-fests that everyone's always so up in arms about? Whether it's CSI, or Everybody Loves Raymond, or South Park, or Trading Spaces, I'm afraid I have yet to see the episodes that are such obvious shills for sponsors' products. Quite the contrary, in fact. When characters in any of these shows are shown eating potato chips, the show goes out of its way to identify them as some unnamed or nonexistent brand. When there's a computer in the scene, they airbrush out the logo. When they're driving a car, you could easily expect the camera to do a long loving sweep from street level up to the cab, lingering over the logo and the nameplate, but it doesn't�car scenes are always brand-agnostic and anonymous. I can't even think of a single counterexample I've seen in recent memory, where it wasn't an obvious plot point for a car to be a Ferrari or a Hummer or something that defines it as a pop-culture icon rather than as a brand that needs advertising. Sure, there are a lot of Macs in movies, as has been noted here and elsewhere�but do those appearances count as advertisements? I mean, come on�seriously. It would be an advertisement if a character using the computer made explicit comments in dialogue describing how much better a Mac was than other computers, or if the fact that it was a Mac played a prominent or active role in any plot point. But it never does. Ever. Instead, the Macs in scene are there only as decorations, because the scene required a computer and the director thought Macs looked cool and/or appropriate to the scene. You know, because sometimes there are computers in places where people work, in real life. Imagine that. Imagine, further: sometimes people eat potato chips. And sometimes people drive cars. If you're going to try to present a show that depicts reality to any degree at all, you're going to want to show people enjoying products; and you know, it's far easier to just have them drinking a Coke that some PA bought from the studio vending machine than to have the prop department make up a can of a fictitious cola brand and have the dialogue tiptoe around what it is, like in that atrocious censored-for-TV version of Disney's Flight of the Navigator where Carolyn asked David, "Do you want New Cola, Classic Cola, Diet Cola, Cherry Cola, or Diet Caffeine-Free Cola?" �all spliced horribly and in a completely different voice over the original line that had "Coke" instead of all occurrences of "Cola". Apparently Coca-Cola not only didn't care significantly about the prospect of having its brand shoved under kids' noses, the company thought the gentle mockery implied in it was so objectionable they refused even to allow Disney to leave the line in without hastily spackling it over. (And that movie's about the most blatant example I could bring up of one that does pepper the audience with then-current product slogans�a plot point being that an alien spaceship had absorbed all of 1986's TV programming memes out of a kid's head in order to learn about human culture. Even then, the slogans are strewn out of context and as jokes. I unnacountably did not have the desire to go eat a Big Mac after the spaceship recited the "Two all beef patties" slogan at me.) I mean, hell, even the shows and movies that use Macs have to pay Apple for the right to show them, not the other way around. What kind of "advertising" is it that takes place against the company's will? What is it that society wants of its entertainment? It's become an article of faith that all TV shows and movies are jam-packed with insidious subliminal messages urging us to go out and buy branded consumables. But if you remember the scene in Wayne's World where Wayne and Garth keep exaggeratedly turning to the camera to shill like paid spokespeople for Nuprin and Doritos and Reebok, what makes that scene so funny is that it resembles nothing we'd ever seen on the screen before outside of actual ads. ... But maybe I'm just fooling myself, and they're all just a lot more sneaky than I can even detect, huh? 'Scuse me, I'm thirsty. UPDATE: Okay... a number of e-mailers have pointed out various examples of what I'm missing. Apparently I am watching all the wrong shows. Then again, even Trading Spaces has that whole Home Depot thing going on, huh? Still. I can't help but think our intellectual gagsmith caste is freaking out over nothing, and using played-out and exaggerated tropes as low-hanging ideas for time-filler jokes. Wouldn't be the first time.