Sun, July 6, 2003

I'm addicted to the Game Show Network. I would be anyway (I mean, reruns of The $100,000 Pyramid any time of day!), but they have a new program called Chuck Woolery: Naturally Stoned, which is sort of a reality show/documentary featuring Chuck Woolery who is the host of Lingo on GSN now, and before that held the mike on Greed, Love Connection, and Wheel of Fortune. When I first heard about Naturally Stoned, I was not much of a Chuck Woolery fan, but I felt that the phrase described him perfectly. (You can read my review of Lingo to see why I believe the man is whacked out of his gourd, naturally or otherwise, all the time.) Naturally Stoned airs Sunday evenings, but Lingo is on during the day, so sometimes I tune in at the office during lunch or other times of boredom.

The thing about the Game Show Network is that it's basically a cheap cable station. They're trying to grow into their own now with some original programming, which is a slap in the face to the sleek, efficient all-rerun cable network business model, but it worked for Cartoon Network, so I can see why it's tempting. But still, cheap they be, and that begets a certain class of advertisers. You've got the requisite cheap-cable "As Seen On TV" ads for Ronco Turnip Twaddlers and what have you. I think they still have the low-cost life insurance ones from time to time. Last week I saw an ad for a product called SpaceBag by Coleman. It's essentially an "As Seen On TV" product, but because it has the Coleman name backing it up, the production values of the commercial are higher. All the elements are there, however.

There are certain key features to any "As Seen On TV" product pitch. Aside from the blue screen with the toll free number at the end, the SpaceBag ad has them all. Maybe they're time-tested tools of the "innovention" trade, and maybe they just all stem from the common aim of selling people something that they don't really need, but every ad has them. They include the overexcited voiceover announcer and the starkly lit but cheery demonstrations of how the product is used. There's a lot of repetition, often the same clip of the product making life easier. Sometimes there's discussion of the installment plan for "easy payments" or even the exuberant price slashing ("Not $49.99, not $39.99, but only $19.99!"), but all of those are merely window dressing for the backbone of the spot.

I recently watched a film called Roger Dodger and in it Campbell Scott plays an executive in the advertising industry. He refers to his line of work as convincing people that they're miserable, because only after you've done that, he says, can you convince them that your product is the key to ending that misery. In not so many words, this is the core driving force behind these ads. They begin by illustrating (with laughable hyperbole) how frustrating your life is today, without the product. If it's a "space age" mattress system (we always just referred to it as "foam rubber"), then they've got video of busy couples leading stress-filled lives and just needing to catch a few Z's before heading back out into the rat race. If it's a cell phone antenna "extender," we get to see a guy driving his Ford Explorer and straining (with histrionic gesticulation) to hear a garbled call. These dramatizations are positively hilarious. I think an excellent art project would be to collect them all and edit them together into one long stream of pre-innovention misery.

Among my favorites has always been the Turbie Twist. This is a product that combines chamois cloth with towel with elastic band to create a smaller, more absorbent hair towel that women (or punk hippie men) can wrap around their long hair when they get out of the shower. Not a bad idea, but someone had to come up with a way to illustrate why life is unliveable without one. (Start laughing now.) First, we see a woman trying to do something else with her hands (if memory serves, she's baking) while a towel perches on her head. She's got a terry cloth bathrobe on and her hair is twisted up in the largest, heaviest, fluffiest towel money can buy. (The admen like to stack the deck in favor of their product; as if there aren't lighter towels she could use?!) Her face is contorted by agony when she leans over to get something out of the oven and this mass of fabric becomes unstable and falls in her way. Next, we see another young lady trying to have a conversation on the phone. But no! Her massive towel helmet is too cumbersome to accommodate such a simple daily task! She gives us a look that says "Whatever am I to do?" as she tries to press the phone to her ear then, finding only a mass of towel blocking her way, glances from the phone to the camera, defeated. Get a clue, hon! Unless you've got hairy ears, you can wrap the towel behind them. It's a snugger fit and you can still talk on the phone (provided this numbskull can remember how to dial).

About a year ago, Turbie Twist took runner-up to the Can-A-Round in terms of overacted demonstrations of the thankless misery we poor unenlightened boobs endure without the miraculous product to help us. The Can-A-Round is a pair of curved plastic tracks, each making an "L." The tracks sit on a shelf in your fridge, starting at one corner and looping all the way along the back wall and forward to the other corner, overlapping so you can slide them apart to the proper width. Then, you place cans (or bottles, although the product's name doesn't suggest that) in the track and fill in the rest of the space with other refrigerator items. The idea being, rather than waste that hard-to-reach space on the back of the shelf, you put cans in there and as you add new cans to the left, the other cans push around the track and expel one on the right. This is a nice idea except what if you want something from the right and you don't have a new can to add to the left? After about four cans, you can switch to the left and eat away at that stock and then once that's exhausted you're right back where you were except you're wasting space on both sides with tracks. (You'll notice the ads never show how miserable life is with the product.) (They also show someone putting beer bottles in one side and soda cans in the other; I hope this is not advised in the user manual, because it won't work unless you want to drink beer and soda in equal proportions.) But, as usual, the demonstration of life without Can-A-Round takes the cake. There are a number of dramatizations, but my favorite is the young boy who wants a soda, but because of inefficient shelf use, finds the fridge to be a cluttered mess. In order to get all the cans in there, twelve cans are stacked in three columns of two, two rows deep. Evidently the tot is a tad epileptic, because while any child I know with motor functions and decent depth perception would know to gingerly lift the can off the top of one of the columns, this kid barrels in with both fists clenched, apparently hoping like a blindfolded apple-bobber that at least he'll come up with something. Needless to say, cans go flying everywhere, and he elicits a look of defeated exasperation. Can-A-Round to the rescue!

So, by now you're wondering how the SpaceBag could possibly have jumped to the top of the heap over such exemplary contenders. It wasn't easy, but they pulled it off. SpaceBag, in case you haven't guessed, is one of those products where you seal your belongings in a plastic bag and remove the air, allowing a few cubic yards of winter sweaters to be stored in one dense little brick that weighs about a half a ton. The nice think about SpaceBag is that it comes in two versions. One, like the ones we've seen a million times, attaches to your vacuum cleaner. The other, for those people who don't travel with a vacuum cleaner on their camping trips, includes a one-way valve at one end which allows you to roll the air out. Unfortunately, they don't have a hybrid version which would allow the rolling method as a backup, because I have a feeling the vacuum method is far better at removing all the air. Also, they illustrate a few cases where the SpaceBag's waterproofness is heralded above its airtightness, including one where a wallet and cell phone are in there. I think you'd have a hard time rolling up a cell phone. Anyway, first they have to show you how deprived your primitive existence has been without SpaceBag. Here's how the spot opens: Dad pulls into the camping space, stops the minivan and walks around to the back. We can see through the window that this thing is packed to the rafters with enough sleeping bags to tuck in all of Mia Farrow's kids twice. (That Mom! Always overpacking!) So, Dad goes to lift the tailgate, trying to take it slow because items may have shifted during takeoff and landing. But Dad isn't going slow enough, because before he knows it, this mass of camping equipment is expanding, breaking free of the tailgate and pushing outward. Tumbling from the top is Junior's teddy bear, and wouldn't you know it, Teddy lands right in a mud puddle. Dad bends to pick it up with a frown of consternation on his face that rivals Nixon's resignation. Closeup on Teddy, sodden with mud and dripping in the dramatic lighting and slow motion.

At this point, I was laughing so hard I cried right through the next twenty seconds of the commercial and didn't see anything until Mom, beaming, held up a vacuum-sealed cell phone and wallet that Junior had just thoughtlessly knocked over the keel of the family canoe.

We can keep our kids from knocking soda cans willy-nilly across the kitchen floor, dry our hair without injuring our spine and keep our teddy bears mud-free... what an age we live in!

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