First published: November, 1994. First posted online: February 16, 2006.
Corpse Allergic to Laundry.
You try rubbing it out, you try soaking it out. But you still have…
Corpse Allergic to Laundry.
Advertising has been with us since the creation of neolithic trade tokens. And yet its growing demands for our attention is met with increasing resentment and indifference. Perhaps our increasing ability to search and find that which interests us, on our own, is making many sellers panic outright. What happens when the buying public at last becomes immune, like an unkillable virus, to being tricked into buying things they neither want nor need?
Case in point, the recent push by telcos to make internet content providers pay for using their networks waiting for someone to call their businesses. The push is recent; but the plans, we suspect, have long been laid. In evidence we site the AT&T “You Will” ad campaign of 1994, parodied here. The ads, you may recall, featured happy middle-class people doing things like making phone calls from the beach, wirelessly working at their computers, or watching videos in the middle of nowhere, and other “far future” concepts that were still rare in the world then. Well, we knew where this crap would lead. If people weren’t in their living rooms staring at a dozen car ads per hour, how would they know they needed to buy a car?
Thus, Ogrek himself is unable to make a magic phone call to his transport… because Glathheld wants to sell him a car.
This is the ugly, dysfunctional world being foisted on us now.
More about car ads in general… later. But in particular, here we see the newly “optioned” Ralph in the guise of Jonathan Pryce, and his stint for Infinti at the time. We have sincerely enjoyed Mr. Pryce in actual works of art, such as Brazil, Pirates of the Caribbean, and of course, Stigmata. But his time portraying an insufferable black-leotarded faux-sophisticate hawking a shiny overpriced box of tin on wheels means that– to this day– whenever we see an Infiniti, or Pryce, on screen… we think of toads forced to sell giant undead insects against their will.
Oddly, the Lexx series never reminds of this strip. But Pryce always does.
Hi, Jon.
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June 2011 update:
Have you ever posted a video, just using cut & paste?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MnQ8EkwXJ0
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