I don't generally comment on television commercials, but one ad that strayed across my Adult Swim experience infuriates and confuses me every time I see it on Cartoon Network's late night block of adult animations.
Idiocy of content aside, the commercial for cheapbooks.com is a series of still shots choppily strung together for some semblance of motion. I haven't figured out if the creators were simply cheap, or thought this was some kind of cutting edge style that would appeal to "the youth." It even comes with a couple of hip black d00ds, to appeal to young adults who they figure simply assume black guys are way cooler than those other brands of hominid. We got one shaved headed cat in shades, and a dreadlocked fellow who doesn't know what a biosphere is. Apparently, he shares that ignorance with the producers of the commercial. BioSPHERE. Not bioDOME!
And the content! Oh, lawdy, is that dumb! It starts out with the shaved guy miming sucking on a baby bottle. Then, someone stirring something in a big bowl with a spoon. Then the guy making a funny face while pulling his ears down. The commentary is weird.
"You gotta try this artichoke dip. My girl made me something that was too spicy, so I went online to cheapbooks.com and looked up..."
Long pause here, like the guy forgot his lines or the producers had 10 seconds they needed to fill.
"...food."
Switch to Dreadman, who laments that he has a big back yard and doesn't know what to do with it. Baldy says, "You should build a biosphere."
"Biosphere? What's that?"
"Go to cheapbooks.com, look it up," Baldy advises.
Note: a biosphere isn't something you build with hammer and nails. A biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems, not to be confused with the movie Bio-Dome starring Pauly Shore.
This painfully inept commercial concludes with the advice that you can "get the book, read about it" from cheapbooks.com.
The ironic thing is, if you have the ability to access cheapbooks.com, chances are you can access Google. And if you did that, you'd know what a biosphere was.
This ad is so insufferably stupid, it enrages me. It is not hip, cool, or cutting edge. It's just stupid to the bone. Whoever created this ad should be consigned to an oubliette for the rest of their miserable existance, to assure that they'd never again inflict such asinine idiocy on cable television.
Google 'obliette.' Or buy the book at cheapbooks.com.
