Year-old UK pre-cinema adverts!

I have no idea why these were in my head (“I just don’t understand you,” Kat just said) but I was thinking about the ads we would see before the movies when we lived in London.

They’re not much different from the ads we get over here, for the most part. I mean, they’re different, but conceptually, it’s the same stuff. Cars, soft drinks, etc. I think maybe because we didn’t bother with a TV license or an antenna, so we never really watched British television when we lived over there, these were mostly my only exposure to that aspect of the culture. (And because, yeah, British television is fucking boring. How many shows about gardening and old people buying antiques can you really get into?)

Anyway, some of these are pretty great. For example:

This campaign from Volkswagen is pretty brilliant. I have no idea how it’s meant to make you want to buy a Volkswagen, but it stuck in my head a year later, so it’s got that going for it. The theme is that they take some free-thinking Englishman and he explains why your favorite movie is stupid. Fucking brilliant, right? They’re not all as charming as the dude in the Lord of the Rings ad, but few people on earth are.

Meanwhile, others still fill me with a palpable annoyance:

The thing about the Snoop Dogg thing I don’t get is, why they’re all American (except for the “Mr. Dogg” guy, whose accent is currently being attempted by Kat as she talks to Dio, our husky) if they work for Orange Mobile? Because it sounds stupid when Americans say “mobile” instead of “cell”. Plus, it’s way funnier watching Snoop deal with the English than some asshole American. But the real reason this ad makes me bristle is because it ran in front of every movie we saw at the local cinema for months – probably four months, and we had no money to do much of anything and the Greenwood Cineworld was £4 on Tuesdays. This whole campaign consisted of American celebrities trying to sell a cell phone provider to the English by being humiliated by some anonymous American actor in a suit. I just didn’t get it. (The ad that followed, with Rob Lowe, made me long for big Snoop Dogg, though)

And this one, which stretched forever, was infuriating until I realized that I could use it to determine if I had time to go to the bathroom and get a soda:

The British are proud of their public broadcasting, and rightfully so. Even living all the way back in Texas now, I still download the podcast of Gilles Peterson’s show from BBC 1 (he’s the shy-looking dude who seems embarrassed to be in the ad). But four minutes of a bunch of DJ’s touting how great they are – especially the Ali G-looking white dude who talks about hip-hop and just embarrasses the shit out of me – is three and a half minutes too many. At least. This one really made me wonder why I didn’t just download everything I wanted to see, or buy it from the shady motherfuckers at Queens Crescent market, rather than endure the cinema experience.

And here is the answer: Wall-E would not want to be my friend anymore if I were a Knock-Off Nigel:

I like that they’re trying to aim this campaign at kids, since their parents probably don’t have the technical know-how to download it and are scared of the Chinese and Polish people who sell the DVDs, but it’s probably a lost cause – by the time they’re old enough to figure that stuff out, they won’t care what Wall-E thinks anymore. Also, funnily enough, the only clip I could find of the Wall-E “Knock Off Nigel” ad was a pirated copy that some jokers threw up there.

Anyway. This has been ten minutes of a very, very specific sort of reminiscence. You’re welcome, for the Lord of the Rings ad. The rest – um, sorry?