I was thinking more about those Hummer ads, and something just occurred to me:

For decades, we’ve had hundreds of ads for dozens of products where the underlying message has been the same: Buy this product and you’ll get a huge boner.

In the past few years, advertisers have been able to run commercials for products whose purpose is exactly that. And the ads always show guys fishing or gardening or sitting at the kitchen table with their wives. In other words, they finally have the chance to come right out and say “buy this to get a boner,” and they say everything except that.

Marketing types live in some bizarre alternate universe.

I must be all kinds of dense, because I’m having a hell of a time making it through The Odyssey. I was meaning to be reading it for pleasure but I can’t tell one name from the next and it just feels like homework.

So I switched to The Once and Future King. And it only took me 40 pages of deja vu before I realized I had seen all of it before, as The Sword in the Stone. According to Amazon, the book is actually a compilation of short stories by T.H. White, the first of which was made directly into the Disney Version (what with its being about an orphan who proves himself and all).

The reason I thought this story was interesting: the Sword in the Stone was always one of my least favorite Disney movies. I thought it was slight and pretty forgettable, like an unfinished chunk of a larger story. But what really stood out and bugged me were all the anachronisms — Merlin wearing a Hawaiian shirt and all that. Contemporary Disney movies like Jungle Book and Robin Hood handled it better. King Louie was genuinely cool (although the British Invasion vultures were kind of annoying). And I still say that having the depiction of the merry men in Robin Hood exploit all the country & western stuff that was popular at the time (with Smokey and the Bandit) was a genius move.

At the time, though, I assumed that The Sword in the Stone was an original invention. I’m not dense enough to think that Disney invented King Arthur, of course, but I just always assumed they’d done their own take on Le Morte D’Arthur or something — like they did with Mulan. And the anachronisms were just annoying Disney formula, like the Genie in Aladdin. (That wasn’t based on a re-telling, was it?)

What’s particularly odd is that in the book, I love it. I think it’s great hearing Merlin talk about electricity, and reading the narrator describe everything in contemporary terms and dialect while explaining that that’s exactly what he’s doing. It’s integral to the whole character of the book and the way it’s told, and it’s a genius move for an adaptation/re-telling.

So this is one of the rare cases where reading the original makes me appreciate the Disney version more. (While at the same time, being a little disappointed that it wasn’t as original as I’d always assumed). It also leaves me wondering if there are any other Disney movies that aren’t direct translations of a book; the only ones I can think of now are two of the most recent, Lilo & Stitch and Atlantis.

Car commercials are getting a lot more aggressive lately. Used to be the worst was that Mistubishi ad with the creepy woman in the beret pop-locking in somebody’s passenger seat like she was having an event. Now it’s hard to watch commercial TV for too long without feeling like you’ve been assaulted.

VW has been all up in everybody’s business, either trying to charm you into buying a Rabbit, scare you into buying a Jetta, or shame you into buying a Passat. The ads for the Rabbit, like the car, would be completely unremarkable and forgettable except for that damn song which grabs on like one of those Wrath of Khan worms. VOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLKSWAAAAAAGEN!

Then those Jetta ads, which don’t seem to be working as hard to sell you cars as they are to freak your shit out. People driving along having some dull conversation so you think it’s an ad for wine coolers or something then BAM! they get T-boned. The ads always end with two people saying “Holy Shit!” — the one in the ad, and me.

Then of course there’s the Passat ads, about “Low Ego Emissions.” I’ve gotta admit I kind of like the concept behind those. And you’ve got to like any series of ads that has a Nemesis. Not long after the Passat ads started, Hummer launched these:

This one also got a “Holy Shit!” out of me. The version posted there on YouTube is the one that’s running now, the one after somebody must have complained. The version I saw ended not with “Restore the Balance” but the real message of the campaign: “Restore Your Manhood.” The other ad in the series is a woman who gets pissed off when a rude woman cuts in front of her son on the playground, and her only recourse is to go out and buy a gas-guzzling Hummer. (She doesn’t even head back to drive the Hummer over the woman’s child, which would’ve at least made some sense).

Before I get lumped in with the “ecofeminist” who posted the YouTube video, and the other tofu defenders complaining about the ad, let me make one thing clear: it’s not the whole “you got to stop being such a damn pussy and start eating steak and drivin’ a big-ass truck and GIT-R-DONE!” that bugs me.

I mean, it’s stupid as hell, but nothing to get all upset on the internets about. Advertisers have been pulling this kind of nonsense for years, trying to grab guys by the short hairs and point and laugh at their flaccidity until they spend money on their whatever. There were a few months at EA where every morning on my way into work I had to walk under a ginormous screen showing an ad mocking guys for being impotent pussies until they bought a copy of Madden or Fight Night or whatever.

But that’s marketing; that’s what they do. There’s some parable that keeps getting trotted out about a scorpion giving a ride to a field mouse or a racoon or something. I forget the details, but it ends with the scorpion killing its passenger and when the passenger asks why he just says “I’m a scorpion” and the moral is that it’s pointless to get angry at a person for being true to his nature. Same goes for ad people: humilating you or flattering you into buying something is their purpose in life. There’s no point in getting all indignant about it.

And that’s why the Hummer ads have me baffled. Being honest is antithetical to what these people do — and if we are going to start seeing truth in advertising from anyone, it’s going to be Hummer?

But with these ads, they’re calling out their core market exactly for what they are — impotent turds with more financial worth than self-worth. They’re coming right out and saying, “You are so hopelessly insecure that even the most mundane of life’s setbacks send you reeling into an impotent rage for which the only solution is to immediately buy a ridiculously oversized, impractical, environment-destroying vehicle that should never have been released to the mass market.” In other words, the exact same message as this parody ad, but for reals.

If other advertisers decide to follow Hummer’s lead and start telling it like it is, I just have one urgent request: please, please, please, stay true to advertising convention and keep urine and menstrual fluid a bright royal blue.