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10 Ads The US Won't See
prostoalex writes "Some ads made by world's leading advertising agencies for well-known brands will never be seen in the United States. The Gucci G-Spot turned out to be too risque, video for Drug-Free America was deemed too disgusting, Internet's favorite Honda "Cog" commercial won't air due to the high prices for a 2-minute spot, and Japanese commercials with American actors have contracts preventing the companies to run the same ads in the US. AdAge provides a link to the pictures and video (Windows Media .ASF format, alas) of the 10 best unaired commercials." I can get the ASFs working under VLC.
Do a search on kazaa for banned commercials. It's too bad they are banned from tv because most are hilarious.
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Squirrel
Actually, we do get it here in the US (though not the wagon version -- a huge shame, as the wagon is gorgeous) -- as the Acura TSX.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I can't see anything advertised on American TV offending anyone else. Save for ads for pork products getting shown in Israel or iin Islamic countries, that orgasmic shampoo in those few spots in the world more uptight that the USA, those horrid infomercials with those insultingly sterotypical "Australian" hosts, or the plethora of ads that are just insulting to the intellegence of a demented bee. Other than that, America is hopelessly anal-retentive and whitebread. Hell, we bore ourselves to death!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Honda's "Cog" ad is a direct homage to The Way Things Go, a 30 minute film of an amazing kinetic art installation (here's a video clip.)
You have to see this at least once in your life -- it's the most amazing "Rube Goldberg" contraption you'll ever see.
Actually, it took 606 takes
s p
http://www.snopes.com/autos/business/hondacog.a
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
I think that Honda, and the ad agency, is lying.
Rob Steiner, agency producer for Wieden & Kennedy, says that not only were practical effects more attuned to the tagline of the commercial, but CG would not have done the job visually, either. "You couldn't create that type of tension with CG," he says.
However, computers did come into play in the editing phase. Indeed, what looks to be one continuous shot is actually two, seamlessly stitched together by Flame operator Barnsley of The Mill in London.
"Our reason for shooting it in two 60-second pieces was damage limitation, really," explains Steiner. "We knew everything physically worked." But the contraption simply wouldn't fit down the length of a single wall at the Paris studio, so half was built and filmed on one side and half on the other.
With the intent of making the spot look like one continuous take, lighting and shadows in the studio had to look smooth over the full two minutes. Still, "due to constant movement, we couldn't even give [Barnsley] a good lighting reference," says Steiner.
The movies work fine in xine, too. I had to launch it from the command-line rather than the browser because of the weird protocol (what *is* mms, anyway?)
Here are the commands you want, to save you digging around the page:
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/mrkippling- birth.asf- babies.asfl l_gore.asfo aches.asf a sf
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/johnsmiths
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/carenz-sku
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/sylvania-r
and of course
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/honda-cog.
Remove the spaces Slashcode's put in the URLs, of course.
(And there's only one P in "Mr. Kipling"...)
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Bah, an actor flubbing a line isn't neceessarily a disaster. If you think about it, people have been putting on plays for thousands of years, and as far as I know, the tradition is not, in any culture, to start over from the beginning if an actor messes up a line. Usually they just try to recover & keep going, and I'm sure that it was the same way with Russian Ark.
That's not to say that Russian Ark wasn't interesting, but the single-take thing isn't unprecedented: Alfred Hitchcock did the same thing with Rope. That film is shown as a single, uninterrupted narrative, but it was shot in a series of 8 minute takes, because traditional film cameras can't hold any more film than that. Russian Ark got around that constraint by shooting with digital film, which can run longer than a reel of 35mm movie film.
I think there are a handful of other examples of this, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. There are some movies shot in real time -- Gary Cooper's High Noon probably being the best example, but also recent ones like Time Code and Nick of Time. Interestingly, even though it's presented as one shot, "Rope" doesn't count as a real time story, because events are presented in an accelerated way (short dinner, fast sunset, etc) so that 100 minutes of "actual" time goes by in 80 minutes of "screen" time. But then, apparently "Russian Ark" covers centuries, so it's not even trying for that one :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL