Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”
Sunday, August 31st, 2008If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering: gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins?
The ad itself is a twin: it [...]
Weirdness Isolation and Sunnydale Syndrome
Saturday, August 9th, 2008The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions [...]
Enjoy Uncertainty: Randomization and the Uncanny iPod
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.”
I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny. Typically, uncertainty is [...]
