The Current Geico Camel TV Ad -- Funny or Not?

Happy New Year, TV Fans!  The Flaming Nose TV Blog will keep up a more robust schedule this year -- fingers crossed -- and we're going to start 2015 with a possibly curmudgeonly but justifiable complaint about the newest GEICO insurance company TV spot featuring a pair of camels being harassed by zoo patrons.

The tone has definitely changed from the original ad featuring Caleb the friendly, gregarious and loquacious camel strolling through an office alerting coworkers to Hump Day.



The general public instantly responded to the genial camel and the ad became a viral favorite.  Good enough -- fun commercial, worth a smile, and the ad creators made the audience fall for and empathize with the agreeable camel who was so excited about Wednesday and wanted to share his enthusiasm.

GEICO went on to feature Caleb in an ad especially designed for movie theaters:




Caleb also co-starred with former football great Terry Bradshaw in several bits for the 2014 Super Bowl:




GEICO's newest Caleb spot, currently running, takes a very different approach.  No longer is Caleb the Camel the star or even the center of attention of the spot.  Caleb isn't even there, just two other camels at a zoo who find themselves the objects of incessant verbal bullying by zoo visitors who can't resist yelling lines from the previous commercials at them.  Funny, right?  And is the tagline supposed to be funny, too?



Really?  It's what's camels are supposed to do, take verbal abuse from morons?  I thought that as a nation we're supposed to be so into stopping bullying behavior in all walks of life.  This spot is a complete celebration of bullying as a pastime, and it's even more unpleasant as it has not only a theme of acceptance of bullying but also a tinge of it's okay to abuse animals, too, because they're supposed to take it.  It's what they do, right?  We can treat animals -- even ones in TV commercials -- any way we want, because that's what they're here for.

What's the logical follow-up to the behavior in this spot, anyway?  The zoo patrons get annoyed because they don't get a response from the camels and start throwing rocks at them or something?  Certainly in real life zoo visitors can't be trusted not to harass the animals.  The Nashville Zoo, for example, explicitly instructs visitors to "Respect the Animals:  Do not make loud sounds, bang on windows, throw objects into exhibits, harass or tease the animals.  Anyone found doing any of the above will be asked to leave the Zoo."  Zoo officials in India complain about rude and rowdy patrons; click here for the story.  People who work in zoos deal with incredibly crass and stupid patrons all the time; click here for an article.  And in London, visitors attending special nighttime zoo fundraising events have behaved disgustingly towards the animals; click here for the article.

The GEICO spot is totally out of line.  The only genuinely funny ending to this ad would be if both camels looked at each other and asked each other "Do we dare?," nod, and then deliver a famous camel spit at the loudest most loutish man in the group of onlookers.  Let the camels defend themselves.

Sure, it's just an ad, but it's indicative of the way that examples of abusive behavior towards animals are considered hilarious by some portion of the population and therefore fit to be used as humor in entertainment and now to sell cheap insurance.

Media coverage of the new ad has been uniformly positive, as seen from this article from Adweek (click here) and this one from Inquisitr (click here).  Sorry. We beg to disagree.

There's a nasty taste to these newest GEICO ads.

GEICO, you missed the boat on this one.

Just Minding Their Own Business

A**holes...

Bullying the Camels

Summer Nose-talgia #23: Harriet Nelson, America's Favorite Real-Life TV Mom!

She wasn't a knockabout clown like Lucille Ball or Joan Davis, nor an actress playing a mom in a sitcom (like Barbara Billingsley on Leave it to Beaver), she was the actual mother of her TV children!  We're talking about the talented Harriet Nelson, born on this date in 1909, wife of the equally talented and business savvy Ozzie Nelson and mother of David and Ricky Nelson, her two kids who grew up to be equally talented, all of whom starred on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

Basic facts about the show:  it began on radio, airing from 1944 - 1954; the kids joined in 1949 playing themselves.  The series migrated to TV in 1952 after they made the successful motion picture Here Come the Nelsons, showing the format could work visually.  The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was on network TV from 1952 - 1966 for a total of 425 episodes and still retains the title of longest-running live action American sitcom.

Though it's still fashionable to mock the so-called "perfect family" construct on sitcoms like this from early TV, honestly, nobody believed that all families were like this or should have been like this.  Life was indeed a little kinder and gentler back then for a few people; maybe some kids' biggest worry was whether or not they'd get a date for the prom or if they'd be jilted at the malt shop, but certainly not everybody's.

So what if Ozzie Nelson in real life was more of a hard-nosed businessman than jaunty hilarious father with no visible means of supporting his family?  Or if Harriet was actually a snazzy jazz band lead singer who had enjoyed an exciting career in show biz and mostly gave it up to become the radio and TV version of herself?  These two talented individuals and their creative partners put their heads together to fashion an amusing version of the idealized family zeitgeist of mid-century America.  Mission accomplished.

As a child of the 1950s and as a fan of TV comedy, I enjoy watching these shows.  Not because they're a refuge from life or because there are no dirty words and everyone's perfect, but because there is something ineffably sweet about their impossible version of the world.  It wasn't my world and it probably wasn't yours, but it was a real place, at least on the TV set.

Here's another fun aspect to those times.  Though companies still use celebrities -- those sometimes-talented motley, addled, selfish, ridiculously rewarded trivial personalities -- to try to sell their wares, back in the day when most celebrities' real personalities were well under cover thanks to round-the-clock publicist oversight, lots of companies wanted that actor endorsement.  So it was with the popular Nelson family from The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.  Who better to gently suggest to audiences that there were a few things for sale out there that might really make their family's life a little better?

First let's look at a few Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet clips, then a slew of the commercials which were embedded in those shows.  Hotpoint and Kodak certainly got their money's worth out of the Nelsons.































Ozzie Nelson passed away in 1975 at the age of 69, Rick Nelson died in a plane crash at the age of 45 in 1985, Harriet Nelson passed away at the age of 85 in 1994, and David Nelson in 2011 at 75.

And We'll Be Right Back... After Another Brief Pause!

Ok, so I had to add these two marvelous commercials from the 60s & 70s. I already commented on Jane's previous post - you can check it out below. These two spots are among my all-time favorites. The first one is from the early 1970s (my time in Warwick, NY) and the second is from the mid 1960s (my time in Bayside, NY). Both commercials bring me right back to those respective places and times.

And Now a Brief Pause for a Word from our Sponsor

Ring around the collar... Pop pop fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is...Winston tastes good like a (knock knock) cigarette should. Sound familiar? If you lived in the US in the 1960's and 70's, you share a collective consciousness of these and thousands of other TV commercial slogans, rhymes and ditties. They are all worn into the long term memory grooves of our brains. Who could ever forget the bilious husband who was forced to eat "marshmellow meatballs" (Alka Seltzer) the cranky granny demanding "Where's the Meat" (Wendys) or the soaring anthem of all the friendly folks who would "like to teach the world to sing...in perfect harmony" (Coke). From the ridiculous to the sublime to the questionable grammar of (my personal favorite) "Chock Full of Nuts is the heavenly coffee...better coffee millionaires, money can't buy". This is a jingle sung by a choir of angels!

Here's a salute to television commercials. Thanks to these little 30 and 60 second messages, we have been able to view millions of hours of nearly free television content for over 50 years. Mundane, maddening or (occasionally) brilliant, these little mini-movies have paid the freight for viewers to be able to enjoy gems like M.A.S.H., and The Office and even our beloved I Love Lucy. I don't believe TiVo is the death knell for TV advertising. Not when my son uses it to rewind and watch a favorite spot over and over again. Clever commercials thrive in the new digital environment, like the iconic and award winning 1984 Apple spot that I've posted above. It has been viewed more than two million times on You Tube. And more than 20 years later, Apple is still charming viewers with the Mac and PC guys (below). By the way, this spot oddly makes me like PC's and Windows even more because the hapless character is so endearing.

Everyone has a most loved or most hated commercial. What's yours?