Commercial Roundup

Mazda – 10 Car Dash

I admit I’m a little curious about the modifications the disclaimer proclaims (disclaims?) have been made for the stunts. I’d like to get some mods like that for my car, in the event that I’m assaulted by Parkour people.

Comcast – Big Old Expensive Phone Company

Comcast, this is just embarassing. Sure, I used to make strawman arguments this insipid, ham-handed and generally Buckley-grade–when I was 12. What’s your excuse?

T. Boone Pickens – Pickens Plan

A problem we can’t drill our way out of? Tell that to Simon.

Bedtime for GONZO

Last time, I mentioned airfare to Japan. What an appropriate segue.

Yep

This promotional spread is almost a review of Strike Witches in itself. And yet it can never quite encapsulate the shallowness, shamelessness and downright idiocy of GONZO’s new direct-to-YouTube (fine, it’s on TV too) anime. Perhaps no picture can.

The picture does a fine job of conveying that Strike Witches is about pantsless girls, in varying degrees of pubescence, who moonlight as catgirls. (Specifically, it’s about their crotches.) What the picture will not tell you is that said girls are as two-dimensional as the simile of your choice. How can I attack their characterization before I see the series past episode one, you ask? Simple. When your character is a flying, half-naked teenage girl with cat ears and a pants allergy, not even Hemingway could make anything meaningful out of her.

For the record, aversion to pants does not seem to be limited to the main characters

But I’ll not belabor the obvious. Now I’d like to move on to addressing potential reasons (both those previously articulated by other reviewers and those I’ve anticipated) to defend this show.

You’re taking it too seriously!
Strike Witches has neither the camp nor the self-awareness to call itself a fun B-movie romp. It is not, like Adam West’s Batman, a terrible show that invites you to sit back, turn your brain off and enjoy the ride. It is a terrible show that prostrates itself before your feet and begs you to buy an episode for three dollars, and while you’re at it, can it interest you in some merchandise. You will not laugh with it, but you will not laugh at it either. You will be too busy staring slack-jawed in disbelief or, alternatively, sobbing quietly.

It’s not as bad as anime X!
That doesn’t excuse Strike Witches any more than the existence of DeviantART excuses Rob Liefeld.

You just hate this kind of thing!
I liked Es and Trigger Heart Exelica, damn you.

At least the action scenes were good!

Open up a picture of some panties in a new browser window, switch rapidly between the two and congratulations! You now know what Strike Witches combat is like

I’ve heard this a number of times from people who really should know better, and it bewilders me every time. Sure, the flyby sequences could be mistaken for something from a decent action anime. You would, however, have to ignore the forced crotch/ass close-ups and stock firing animations that comprise the remaining 70 percent of the battles. The whole mess is hacked together with no regard for flow or even coherence. The camera whips around like an excited puppy that has been set on fire.

Strike Witches is no Macross in terms of fight choreography, to be sure. But should we expect it to be? Given the show’s supposed focus on dashing aerial combat, I have no problem with doing so.

Strike Witches is no Macross in enemy design, either. The enemies are three-polygon, one-texture blobs the likes of which you would expect to encounter in an early-’90s FPS. They wouldn’t even be particularly strong enemies.

This is intimidating.

In sum, you shouldn’t watch Strike Witches with your friends. But nor should you watch it alone. You should not watch it in a box; you should not watch it with a fox. Strike Witches is the anime equivalent of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation – an expression of the shame of a culture. GONZO, please make like Griffith and die of cerebral hemorrhage. Griffith, I’m sorry I compared you to GONZO; please don’t come after me as a zombie.

Commercials: Subway and ANA

I’ve recently been seeing a new commercial promoting Subway’s five-dollar footlong deal, presumably for the benefit of alien body snatchers who have never encountered a Subway or a television before.  The commercial seems to be unknown to my friends outside California, nor is it posted on YouTube (otherwise I’d link it here,) suggesting that the ad is restricted to my locality.

I am thus forced to contemplate what about my area suggested to Subway marketing executives that we would like to buy a product referred to as a “Yum Rocket.”  The only product to which reasonable minds could ascribe a name like that would be a dildo–and not even a good one, but a bubblegum pink lump of smelly Thai resin, jagged with flash.  This is not something I would particularly like to put in my mouth, not even in the process of perpetrating “Grand Theft Sandwich.”

The other commercial I’d like to highlight is not exactly new, but at least it’s online for me to show you.  As embedding is disabled, please refer to this link.

A bold effort, All Nippon Airlines, but I’m fairly certain weeaboos comprise less than 10 percent of the global market for airfare to Japan.  Also, your animation smacks of Amerimanga.