If there's one good thing to come out of the recent lunatic-fringe freakout over Coca-Cola's multilingual Super Bowl ad, it's definitely this parody featuring languages that didn't quite make the original cut.
Comedy troupe Garlic Jackson, which previously (and brilliantly) mashed up "Blurred Lines" with The Cosby Show intro, have dropped a new audio track on the Coke spot, "America Is Beautiful." The parody's additions include the dulcet tones of Star Trek's Klingon and Game of Thrones' Dothraki. I'll let you hear the rest for yourself.
Newcastle Brown Ale, which didn't buy airtime in Sunday's Super Bowl but is doing a wonderfully silly campaign about how it almost did, rolled out more content from Droga5 this week—including the hilarious endorsement below by Anna Kendrick.
Just like last week's Newcastle trailer was the year's best Super Bowl teaser, Kendrick's performance will surely be the funniest among this year's celebs.
Newcastle has done a lot of great stuff around this faux Super Bowl campaign, including a brilliantly self-mocking native ad on Gawker as well as bogus focus-group videos and another endorsement video starring Keyshawn Johnson.
"It seemed like the obvious thing we had to do, and unfair to the world if we didn't," Newcastle brand director Quinn Kilbury said of the Super Bowl ambush. "The Super Bowl is great. The game is amazing, everyone loves the game. But it's become much more about marketing in some ways, and the over-the-top ridiculousness that surrounds it. I saw a lot of that when I was doing the real Super Bowl marketing stuff over at Pepsi, so it's close to my heart, and it is a little ridiculous sometimes. For a brand that likes to poke fun at marketing, we had to poke fun at Super Bowl marketing at some point."
He added: "The brief to Droga5 was, essentially, hijack the conversation around Super Bowl marketing. We had a couple of ideas, but essentially that was it. At first I think we saw doing something around the game itself, but then we thought if you're going to do the Super Bowl, or the Super [Bleep], as we're calling it, you have to be true to the whole marketing show. You have to treat the commercial like it's a $100 million blockbuster."
Perhaps known as well these days for her heartbreaking animal PSAs as for her 1990s hit singles, Sarah McLachlan shows in a new Audi Super Bowl ad teaser that she doesn't always take herself too seriously.
Audi has been teasing an odd creature creation called the Doberhuahua, which appears to be the star of the automaker's upcoming game-day ad. (You can see reactions to the crossbred canine in another clip below, called "Dog Show.")
In a video released today, McLachlan croons for the misunderstood animal, with "a heart as big as your head." Check it out for yourself:
Ever get the feeling that if you've seen one piece of schlocky Sundance festival fodder, you've seen them all? If so, you're going to appreciate the many tired tropes folded into the faux trailer for "Not Another Sundance Movie."
Even if you don't consider yourself an indie film aficionado, you'll quickly see the truth in this satirical clip, beginning with the opening message that the movie was created by the duo of "Film Student With a Rich Uncle & Actor Trying to Be a Director."
The fake footage itself may not be all that entertaining or convincingly shot, but the snarky text overlays definitely make the nearly 3-minute video worth watching. Via /Film.
Humans fit a lot of stuff in the time capsule on Voyager 1 to give any aliens who stumble upon the space probe a sense of our civilization. But they might have just included this mock PSA by Tom Scott for the Interstellar Safety Council, warning alien species about human ferocity and unpredictability. So many good moments here, particularly the section on our vulnerabilities, which of course our arrogance causes us to all but ignore.
It's funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest. I want to see a sci fi universe where we're actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species. How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn't be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare "animal" races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth? Like that old story "they're made of meat," only we're scarier.
We're certainly a threat to ourselves. Why wouldn't we be a threat to others?
Sometimes, parody posters actually make you want to see a movie more than the real ads do. That's definitely the case with a few of these "honest" Photoshop recasts of Acadamy Award Best Picture nominees from College Humor.
Specifically, American Hustle might have done even better at the box office if it were really called "Jennifer Lawrence" and featured the tagline "wigs, tans, boobs."
What do you get when you combine the soulless, artsy advertising imagery of CK One with the doughy, balding, angst-sweaty magnificence of Louis C.K.? One awesome Tumblr, that's what.
Louis CK One is a mashup that combines images of the comedian, famous for keeping it real, with the plastic, hyperstylized aesthetic of Calvin Klein. Bogus billboards and faux magazine spreads display his pot belly and shiny pate in close proximity to stylish "Louis CK One" bottles, creating an image so oxymoronic it becomes social satire.
Refinery29 guesses at the "Louis CK One" bouquet: "Aniseed and pizza grease? Citrus and flop sweat? Baby powder and righteous rage?" Hey wait, that's what the real CK One smells like!
The joke ads posted so far are great, but I'm hoping for a parody of Calvin Klein's pretentious commercials. Imagine a Louis C.K. impersonator (or the real deal) rocking a black sleeveless number, wagging his Doritos-smeared middle finger at the camera and lamenting, as he did last year to Conan O'Brien, "You never feel completely sad or completely happy; you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die!"
How do you one-up Jean-Claude Van Damme doing splits atop two Volvo trucks? With Chuck Norris doing splits on two airplane wings, of course.
Hungarian production house Delov Digital created the insane parody clip below to mark the holidays, with Norris and a crew of tactical airborne comrades creating a festive formation in the skies.
While it might lack the subtlety of our other favorite "Epic Split" parody, the clip definitely gets points for both its star power and its over-the-top embrace of CGI shenanigans. Via Mashable.
Grasshopper.com's epic parody 1980s entrepreneurial video has all the right things. It has the word "epic" in the title. It has that one-take, walking toward the camera while grabbing props out of nowhere thing that people go nuts for. It has a great actor who went to the Shatner school of pausing. It references psychologically important American cult films like American Psycho. And it includes amazing '80s music. It even has amazingly useless joke acronyms. And if you don't love it for all that, watch it to see the best example of a business card ever conceived. All of which is why it's another YouTube success for this small business that serves small businesses. The only thing that would have made it better is kittens.
Remember British Airways' interactive "Look Up" billboard with a kid pointing at airplanes as they flew by overhead? Well now Domino's U.K. is spoofing the concept with its own "Look Down" billboard. It's kind of a heady concept, but bear with me here: The British Airways billboard pointed to planes while displaying their flight numbers and trajectories, so the Domino's version is a kid pointing down at pizza delivery drivers, with different messages about where each pizza is headed. It's working out pretty well for them, which makes sense. Domino's has a lot of experience with parody, since the brand's been doing it to pizza every day for over 50 years. Via Mashable.
The parodies of Jean-Claude Van Damme's "Epic Split" for Volvo Trucks are already getting old, but this one's good for a chuckle. Channing Tatum set aside some time on the set of his upcoming sequel to 21 Jump Street (awesomely called 22 Jump Street) to attempt his own leg-spreading demonstration. While flexibility is clearly not his strong suit, I'm sure this clip will still do well among a certain demographic or two. With that hair, Tatum could probably just pose in front of a camera for 93 minutes and still earn more in box office sales than The Fifth Estate. Via Reddit.
You've undoubtedly seen them: the saccharine-slathered headlines of Upworthy.com, promising you'll "never see the world the same again" after watching some YouTube video about bullied kids or racism or whatever. Now you can create your own must-click words of wisdom with the Upworthy Generator, which combines random emotional video screen grabs with cobbled cliches for results like "Try Not to Let Your Jaw Hit the Floor When You Hear These Twelve Words."
Created by digital content mastermind Mike Lacher, who penned McSweeney's beloved article "I'm Comic Sans, Asshole," the Upworthy Generator mocks just about all the stereotypes you'll find in the site's overly optimistic presentation style. Lacher, a man all too familiar with headline trappings from his days as a creative director for BuzzFeed and creator of that site's Pepsi-branded "Listiclock," nails Upworthy's recurring themes of wisdom from children, popular icons fallen from grace, emotional righteousness and David-versus-Goliath battles against bullies/authority/oppression.
A few of my personal favorites, randomly created by the Upworthy Generator: • Think Things Used to Be Better When You Were a Kid? Maybe You Should Listen to This Disgraced Former Model. • That Moment When an Oscar Winner Doesn't Accept Bullying. • Here Is What Happens When a Beauty Queen Gets Real About the Biggest Problem in America. • Try Not to Shout With Rage When You Hear the Eighth Word. • Watch a Bullied Veteran Become an Inspiration With Five Words. • What This Transgender Mother of Three Did Is Genius.
Few things are more perilous and panic-inducing than getting separated from your companions in an Ikea—an experience that some young filmmakers have now captured in a perfect parody of the trailer for Gravity.
"If I don't make it … promise you'll keep shopping," pleads the Sandra Bullock stand-in, wandering the desolate consumer wasteland and cowering in the throes of Ikeaphobia. "Promise you'll find everything else on the list."
With her cellphone battery almost drained, will she make it? Will they be reunited? Will the self-serve area even have half the stuff they just spent nine hours picking out? My blood pressure rises just imagining such a nightmare.
Most presidents go through a second-term depression, but Obama's has been particularly dismal. To help out, Saturday Night Live has introduced Paxil Second Term Strength, a depression medication for the narrowest target market imaginable: the president of the United States. Paxil Second Term Strength makes you feel like you're giving a speech on a college campus in 2008 or getting Bin Laden all over again. It's even powerful enough to deal with symptoms from Benghazi to that time Jay-Z and Beyoncé went to Cuba. Not a Democrat? No problem. There's also new Paxil Republican Strength for when you have to answer to Congress or the Koch Brothers. It's not the funniest of SNL, but it's worth a chuckle. It also appears to be some excellent product placement, given that Paxil is a real medication with a registered trademark whose packaging and logo were used in the spot—a fact which should be far from depressing for Paxil's brand managers.
Sometimes, the best parodies are the most subtle. Case in point: This truly impressive face dub of disgraced Toronto Mayor Rob Ford onto the body of Jean-Claude Van Damme in his "Epic Split" ad for Volvo Trucks. There's really nothing to it beyond the face switch, but the effect is so perfectly executed by New York-based visual effects shop Artjail, it's plenty satisfying. "We were completely in awe of the Volvo-Van Damme 'Epic Split' spot," Artjail writes in its YouTube summary, "and remain completely in awe of Mayor Ford's epic lifestyle north of the border." Check out Artjail's demo reel after the jump and see some images of how it was done over on Fstoppers. Hat tip to Evan Travers for sending me this one.
Honest Slogans is yet another snarky advertising Tumblr that is exactly what it sounds like, for better or worse. I feel like there's already a lot of stuff like this out there, and whoever's moderating Honest Slogans could have been a little pickier. There are three separate iterations of "We don't have Coke, is Pepsi okay?" and that's only funny once. I did get a chuckle out of "FedEx: It's Probably Broken," though.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
