NOT YOUR FATHER'S APPLE FAIL - New Big Picture
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- Опубліковано 14 жов 2024
- / moviebob1
Apple finally found a commercial everyone could hate more than their "Mother Nature" spot when they debuted an iPad Pro with a bizarre "CRUSH!" video that drew backlash and outrage from artists and creatives ...and then backlash TO backlash from ...various others. Was everyone just being "hyper-sensitive," or did the frequently obtuse tech giant hit a bad nerve without even trying - one that corporate marketing just can't seem to STOP hitting across the history of the medium.
In a special EXTRA-LENGTH #BigPicture, we take a look at the history of a strange recurring commercial theme that nobody ever likes but companies just can't stop using - and why people got SO MAD this time.
#iPad #iPadPro
It just dawned on me this is almost the perfect antithesis of the Apple 1984 ad. A bleak monochrome subject being broken to free forced conformity on the audience vs the audience watching a bright, colorful, and varied collection being destroyed into a single sterile homogeneous object.
Oh wow, you're absolutely right. Ouch.
and Epic rightfully pointed out Apple's own hypocrisy over the whole Fortnite thing years ago.
100% yes
From someone on Twitter a few weeks ago:
"In 1984, Apple made an ad where the Mac represented freedom and colour, destroying a cold, grey world with the throw a hammer.
40 years later, Apple made an ad where they destroyed freedom and colour with a hydraulic press in favour of the cold and grey."
They are really telling on themselves.
The funniest thing about this commercial is that it plays monumentally better if you just play it in reverse. All you need to do is show a person putting the iPad onto the press, then play it as normal. You then have all this creativity and joy coming out of the iPad, not being crushed into it. What a misfire.
Lots of good suggestions for fixing the ad in the replies; it's like there were plenty of ways to make a decent ad if only whoever made it hadn't been horny for the crushing montage in particular.
That ad is just "Look! Everything you've come to hate about being alive in the 21st century" for 60 seconds.
"GIVE US MONEY SO YOU CAN HAVE A FLAT CORPSE"
holy crap that;s a good line, love it. Same with "Apple-branded cultural roadkill"
I entirely missed this controversy and every time you revealed a new dimension of "What the fuck were they thinking???" I could not stop laughing. Especially the "My father's Oldsmobile?...[cut to extended reverie]" had me fully cackling.
Fun fact, Ransom E Olds, From right here in my city of Lansing, Michigan, was the guy who founded Oldsmobile which eventually became part of general motors. He also made a lot of vehicles under his initials, REO, which includes a fire truck that's called the REO Speedwagon, which inspired the name of a famous '80s band which inspired the name of a JoJo character.
I had fun with those facts 👍
Like I always say: Good communication is not about being understood. It's about making sure you CAN'T be MISUNDERSTOOD.
Hearing Bob venting about pop culture/tech is my favorite way to start a Monday. Bring back the junk drawer-type vids!
Damn I legitimately didn't know that "not your father's" etc had an actual singular origin story. I thought it was just like a thing people said.
After all these years Bob is still teaching me new things I didn't know about pop culture!
There’s an entire hair care brand called Not Your Mother’s. I too thought it was just some long entrenched cultural thing
Only thing I know about that ad campaign is that Mel Blanc was in one of the commercials with his son and it was one of the last things he did before his death.
I remember those ads growing up as a kid. I never expected it to be Oldsmobile's biggest blunder.
Me neither! And it's fascinating that ad copy that is considered one of the biggest blunders of marketing history still has such staying power. So weirdly, maybe they were on to something....
Wait until you find out where "Boogaloo" came from...
This commercial reminds me of that pokémon commercial where there's a bunch of pokémon in a bus and then the bus goes into a fucking trash compactor and squishes them all screaming until it gets crashed into a game boy.
What a thing that existed.
I was thinking the exact thing. Also remembering the sinister glee on the bus driver's face. That commercial was pure trauma.
The difference is, that commercial knew what tone it was going for, cartoonishly sinister AND the Pokemon survived.
Except we didn't see pikachu's eyes burst out of its sockets 😂
Ew 😕
"Turn them into Pokemash! Pokemash!!"-Nostalgia Critic
The fact that this advert would have had to go through several levels and at no point did any of them say "hold the fudge up" is hilarious
So basically someone at Apple thought that making an ad that is thematically and narratively the exact opposite of their iconic “1984” ad (which was directed by no less than than Ridley freakin’ Scott) was a banger of an idea.
This ad strikes me as written by a tech bro. It's basically the generative AI argument in 68 seconds. It ignores all the actual human experience and says "technically we're correct and you don't technically need to use these things, therefore they're useless now. It's drawing a vert arbitrary line and hoping consumers don't actually understand
It's also illustrative of tech-bubble douchebags committing acts of artistic and cultural vandalism so their aging, out-of-touch angel investors across the country will stop asking "...What are you spending our money on, exactly?" Show 'em some Jetsons BS and say "BEHOLD, THE FUTURE!" like you're Mandrake The Magician, and the old coots will keep throwing money at you so you can spend it the way a ten-year-old would.
Tech bros in general are under this mistaken impression that they're marketable. And this is coming from a guy with a degree in computer science. Seriously, all these billions and billions of dollars into cryptocurrency, into generative algorithms (I refuse to call them AI), into metaverses and digital landscapes, into celebrity cameos, into cybertrucks and sleek sterile pods -- all of this stuff that has NO SELLING POINT. Who's going to use a metaverse? What do NFTs offer me that a credit card doesn't? How does ChatGPT make my life better? (in fact it usually does the opposite) None of these rich tech bros every think to stop and ask if any of their own EMPLOYEES want to use any of this stuff, much less their customers
And it's that mentality that caused this ad. "You don't need these priceless memory makers and awe-inspiring pieces of genuine art, they're relics of an older physical era. We're moving you into the digital age!"
Tech bros are under the mistaken assumption that their ideas are marketable
Nailed it
What's a "tech bro"?
Dear God... I remember getting viscerally angry at that old "Star Trek" trailer back in 2009 (and I'm one of the people who actually kind of liked the reboot). I had kind of a rocky relationship with my dad, and "Star Trek" was one of the few things that we could actually bond over when I was a teenager, when we used to fight about everything. Seeing Paramount pitch that movie as "Not your father's Star Trek!" felt like a slap in the face.
That appears to be the motto of most remakes, reboots and anthology sequels these days.
That whole shpeal about 'My father's Oldsmobile' suddenly made me think back to my mom's old Bronco that she drove when I was a kid, and now I'm just very, very sad.
My mom had a Toyota Town and Country. That thing easily held six kids and a large dog, or like five kids and everyone's camping gear. It took us on so many Girl Scout camping trips and family road trips.
What this ad reminds me of is an ad for Gen 1 Pokemon that I think I saw on my VHS copy of Pokemon The First Movie.
There was an ad where a bus driver was picking up a bunch of Pokemon, only to drive them to a car compacter and crush them all inside. Then he picked up a GameBoy and started playing Pokemon.
The main difference though is that we didn't see Pikachu's mangled corpse be lodged with pieces of Squirtle's shell, the crushing was all implied and distant. Then, when the bus driver picked up the GameBoy, all the Pokemon were totally fine inside of it.
The Samsung clapback ad reminds me of "This is how you share your games on PS4."
The 5 seconds that Xbox never recovered from
It's an opportunity you don't pass up.
... and now they make "disc-free" consoles so you don't have to share with anyone!
I think if they'd just had all these art objects swirl up into a cartoon CGI vortex and get sucked into the ipad, it would have blandly but inoffensively conveyed the idea they were after, and no one would have thought twice.
This. 100% this. This storm of controversy passed me by and so this was my first look at it, and I just kept remembering this as like a type of commercial in the 90s. Like some good thing like gushers or combos or gum (I can’t quite remember what it was) this the “we’re packing all of this into that” crushing stuff idea and because they did it with bad 90s CGI it looked enough unreal as to not get you subconsciously thinking “They’re crushing my favorite food!”
@@paulb.7998 That, and food is fundamentally intended to be crushed eventually. Mashing up some peanuts doesn't make it not-food, it just makes a different food.
Or start in cartoon virtual space in the iPad with all these things working as cartoon virtual objects and then zoom out to the iPad. It would be dull, “ Ooohh computers run programs “ but it would not be destructive.
@paulb.7998 Reminds me of a magazine cover I saw as a little kid where someone was holding a big stack of floppy disks in one hand and a USB drive in his other hand, and the text on the cover said something like "how to hold a hundred floppies in your hand."
That Samsung ad made me tear up too - how she handled that beat up guitar reminded me of when we were late teens and my brother was learning guitar with two strings.
It makes me think of people who restore and repurpose vintage and antique pieces.
I swear there were many people working on the ad who thought "This ad is going to be a shitshow", but would rather keep it under wraps in their minds. There were just earning a paycheck and it was not worth it for them to protest to the blind people higher in the food chain funding the project and risk losing their jobs pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Surprised that the shoe toon from Who Framed Rodger Rabbit? wasn't in the montage of traumatic movie scenes.
Bob, this is not just the kind of video essay that really makes me appreciate you as an artist.
It also really makes me want to take you out for a beer. I would love to hear you talk about really almost any culturally significant thing that's happened in the last 20 years over a few yuenglings.
How do these hideous commercials get approved?
People get paid to make this! WHAT AM I DOING WRONG!?!?
And this is why I change the channel when the commercial break starts.
My friends and I, artists, writers, and musicians, have been pretty alarmist about generative AI, so we took this commercial as a personal attack on us. The visceral reaction to it actually fills me with hope. Also, in the entire time my friends and I have been talking about gen-AI, we never thought of the word "tactile," which is the perfect word for my side.
The thing that gets me is the part where it holds on the little emoji ball. You know, the thing with a recognizable face, as it is slowly crushed and destroyed, looking as if they had just killed a person. Like, who made that decision? Who thought that was going to be anything but disturbing?
Edit: The oppressive, dull color scheme also doesn't help the general atmosphere of the commercial.
I can't find the link now, but someone (I think LinusTechTips) pointed out that there was a conceptually similar "stuff crushed by a press to make our new tablet" ad from Samsung (I think) a few years back that didn't incite the same controversy. There were differences though, the Samsung ad was in a high tech, brightly lit factory, so it was a kind of goofy joke that "this is how we really make our hardware" and the focus wasn't on capturing every splinter and shard of glass flying off all the expensive artistic objects being obliterated to make another glass slab. Plus of course that was before generative art was inflicted on the world, so people were less sensitive to the imagery of a corporation grinding down human artistic endeavor to sell you their product at the time.
@@LJDouglas What is "generative art"?
@@adamdavis1648AI "art"
"It was said of the dwarfs that they cared more about things...than they did about people. people.... It was said mostly by people like Mr. Windling.
But they _did_ care fiercely about things. Without things, people were just bright animals."
-Terry Pratchett, _The Truth_
Imagine if Amazon advertised the Kindle by using books as kindling.
Would be hilarious honestly
Idk, I think that could be kinda...FIRE
I'd like to say that nobody who works in advertising would be so stupid as to use that particular image, but considering that the Apple crush ad and the "Just for Feet" Superbowl ad exists, I can't rule it out.
Oh, look up "Just for Feet Superbowl Ad" at your own peril, and know that the CEO of the company questioned that ad before the ad company convinced him to run it, and this ad played a pretty big role in why "Just for Feet" doesn't exist anymore. Also, Just for Feet was a shoe store.
Winking at the idea with that choice of name was enough without making it too explicit.
@@mrevilducky
Not for long. Especially with all that burning books implies.
ad creator: what if we make the Zabriskie Point ending but with an industrial crusher to make an IPad instead to angry reject materialism
TIM COOK: PERFECTION.
Simple better way to have done the Oldsmobile rebrand
Narrator: “this is your father’s oldsmobile”
*nostalgic black and white shots of family using oldsmobile include some of Bob’s oldsmobile spiel dialogue but with a calm comforting paternal voice. Then fade to a new color shot of a new oldsmobile in a driveway, with a new family getting in, getting ready to go on vacation*
“This is *your* Oldsmobile”
*family drives off into the summer for adventures of their own*
“*Your Oldsmobile*” is just so much better then “*Not your Father’s Oldsmobile*” but I guess the 90’s was about trying to be edgy.
Maybe even not a family but a friend group of hot young people riding off to some beach town vacation.
I feel like the metaphor of this ad wasn’t “the iPad replaces all of these things.” That would make no sense for the angry birds toys, for instance.
I think the intent was simply “all this stuff exists in an iPad, which is no thinner than ever.”
That said…it really seems like that’s not the message that most of the internet took from this ad, and that matters more for an ad than the intent.
The problem is that with all the violence in the advertising, it consistently capitulates from that idea. Why destroy the musical instruments? You can't replace that on an iPad and you definitely can't get the same experience of playing the live instrument on an iPad. If a clown is driving your expensive car, I do not care if your car cost a quarter of a million dollars, I want to know about the Clown
That was exactly the intent, but the execution was kind of awful, especially in the current climate.
If they had some a newer version of the old "there's an app for for that" instead of the crush stuff, I guarantee people wouldn't have been as angry
Bob literally talked about what you just said, and criticised the "you just didn't get it" people
But we know all this stuff is available for an iPad. Do car companies sell cars by showing a drive down a suburban road ? do airlines show a landing at a hub airport ? Showing angry birds a 15 year old low end game does not show off a brand new computer, nether does a book reading app or a metronome. The iPad is already incredibly thin if someone wanted to do all the stuff an iPad could do but smaller they could use their iphone. The underlying arguments of the ad make no sense. Here is an ordinary device on which you do ordinary things but thinner.
IMHO Apple has crippled the iPad with its app store model. No one who spends the time and effort to make good software can be paid enough in the app store to pay back the development costs. Without good software the iPad is stuck with metronome apps ,angry birds, and social media.
@@shindean Yeah. I've seen this sort of ad done and there's plenty of ways to do it in a better way - like, 'squeezing everything into a box' but non-destructively wouldn't have had *nearly* the same visceral revulsion.
"a terrible image no one wants to see in a commercial" describes way too many commercials I see these days.
that's one reason why I use Adblock online pretty much all the time.
The Apple ad is the most perfect metaphor about and against generative AI I think we'll ever get.
When I first saw that ad, I thought, "Really, THIS was how they are messaging it?" There were obviously better ways of going about it. Off the top of my head, they could have tried, say, showing a gigantic version of the new iPad slowing coming down like that industrial press, but just have the items slowly vanish into the iPad as it comes down - no distortion, no destruction whatsoever, maybe show the stuff appearing on the screen, but otherwise, nothing particularly special. Then, once that iPad is on the floor, bring in more presses from the sides and have them squish it down to its actual size.
See, simple.
Would this have made it a good commercial? Probably not, but I would like to think that it would have avoided at least most of the backlash (because unlike Apple, I am not deluded enough to believe that my own idea would not face any backlash).
Much better - maybe have the items as holograms that 'pop' and then appear as the related app on the screen?
As a "look how much stuff our iPad can do" type message, riffing on Mary Poppin's magic bag, having someone cramming all these progressively larger items into the iPad, with some fun visual gags for somehow squeezing a full arcade cabinet and piano into it, could have been a cute and memorable message, rather than the trillion dollar company's unfeeling steel slab crushing all these beautiful, tactile objects so they can sell you their latest glass slab.
The problem is, I'm pretty sure the entire impetus of the commercial is that they wanted to cash in on the hydraulic press concept. I don't think it could have turned out any other way with that idea at the forefront.
I don't like seeing vintage objects getting destroyed, regardless of the reason; there's a history to them, and there's value in those objects both because of their history and what we put into them. I was unaware of this commercial until now, but seeing all that stuff getting crushed, I get the feeling the people who made it probably though it was visceral and cool to see, but it just made me upset, which seemed to be the main reaction everyone else had. I get the intent behind it, the execution is botched as all get-out.
yeah same here, I somehow missed this commercial and the backlash and seeing it now makes me scratch my head.
It's that a giant corporation is doing this and the arrogance of said corporation to think they could do this and we'd lap it up... That's the salt in the wound.
I really enjoyed this episode. I think it was the visceral emotional response you had to the ad, its concept and execution. Keep up the great work Bob!
thank you for the history lesson for Oldsmobile
i honestly never knew where the phrase, "Not Your Dad's..." came from. I assumed it was one of those phrases and things that was just in the culture for years and was meant as way to be cooler or something. I didn't know it came from a marketing campaign and that it was an unsuccessful one. That was interesting to learn and know. thank you for this Moviebob. this is the kind of thing that I come back all the time for your videos for. learning small bits of pop cultural history that might not've been taught in schools either due to not thinking we were ready for it, or because it was a small thing that might relate to a larger unit we're working on or something.
keep up the good work
and thank you for being one of the rays of sunshine in my life
The commercial is simultaneously offensive and oddly generic, like it's an ad for the idea of personal computers rather than this one specific new tablet model. "Hey, you can use this thing for playing games and making art and music" okay, but how is your shiny new rectangle different from my current well-loved rectangle?
And at least among my folks Apple was the Artist computer and not the dead world of PCs etc.
26:41 The “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” ads fail whether you start with positive _or_ negative opinions of Oldsmobile. Even if you don’t feel personally attacked, if you have nostalgia for, say, the Oldsmobile you grew up with, these ads were saying “these new cars are unlike the thing you have nostalgia for, so they’re not for you”. And if you had negative associations, these ads were reminding you of the connection between those negative associations and these new cars.
It’s _really_ hard, psychologically, to say “this thing/product/company/brand that you dislike is better now” without reinforcing the “that you dislike” part in their minds.
4:58
commercial reminds me a little bit of that Pokémon Red & Blue commercial with the Bus Driver crushing all the Pokémon into a Gameboy. with the tagline where can you catch all 150 Pokemon, with the crushed bus turning into a gameboy in the end.
I have a simple way to fix this ad - *reverse the footage.* The ipad seemingly gets crushed, but when the hydraulic press comes up, all these objects and colours seemingly emerge from it, showing all the possibilities the ipad has to offer.
"No one who only ever sees commercials on tv will have seen"
So that explains why I have no idea what this video is about.
Why does this ad seem like something G K Chesterton would come up with as a joke if he were alive today.
The Oldsmobile/Star Trek part made me laugh because in my liked videos is the commercial from that campaign with William & Elizabeth Shatner.
Here’s my pitch for the Apple commercial for probably what they wanted to do. Opens up to a bunch of kids dressed in lab coats. They get all kinds of instruments and books and video games and they throw them into a giant cardboard machine and they press the big start button and out pops the iPad on the other side and they are all amazed.
But nobody is amazed any more. Every user of smartphones, tablets and pcs which is anyone who is going to watch this ad will know about computer games, music creation software, word processors and book reading software. They may not use it but they know it exists. The selling point in the ad is that the tablet is thinner than another apple tablet, who would care but an extremely style conscious purchaser of apple tablets ?
It's insane. We tend to forget that compression and rendering are words with destructive precursor meanings: compressing an grape to make wine destroys everything about its texture. Rendering a pork belly to make lard destroys the possibility of bacon. And here is iPad promising that the piano you love will be put through tinny speakers--of all the things Apple makes, the speakers annoy me the most.
Recently, it seems like some tech ads are sabotage being tested on executive or marketing teams to see if they can tell the difference. Once you show personified things dying to make an Apple product, it's hard not to then think about how the literal products are made in the real world factories. Definitely reminds me of what I'm doing to the world when I buy an Apple device.
This might be the best thing you’ve done in a while, and I’m a long time fan. Most of your stuff is good, even great, but this was amazing. Thank you Bob.
With this video and the last one you're really knocking it out of the park, Mr Chipman. Even though I neither knew the Adult Swim show before nor had I seen that apple ad, both your videos spoke to me on a deep level. You definitely still got your touch, if you didn't actually get better and better over the years.
The phrase "read the room" carries more weight than one would think. Something Apple and the mentioned ilk should've understood.
I was not prepared to learn that "Stop, stop, he's already dead!" comes from a Simpsons Krusty the Clown-themed parody of McDonald's lore
So, basically...marketers and tech companies are completely inhuman and out of touch. Must be a day ending in Y.
This is awesome. Not only does Bob spend half an hour calling Apple Marketing to the front of the class and bleeding red ink all over their work, he then at 21:40 single-handedly pitches an astronomically better commercial based on the same themes than the entire overpaid marketing department was able to put together. Awesome
I think another aspect to all this is that artists in general are coming off of years of dealing with bullshit like nft’s and now all this AI shit trying to literally replace our livelihoods and this commercial comes around and shows the traditional tools of art being destroyed and replaced by a machine. I could see why most artists had a negative reaction to that.
This is one of the best videos you’ve made. I’d love more like this.
I was totally unaware of this ad until this video. WHAT IN THE HELL WAS THE FOCUSSING ON THE EMOJI'S EYEBALLS POPPING OUT OF IT'S HEAD?!?!?!?!
The direction I would have taken is not destroying or replacing the old stuff.
Have it be a museum of fun stuff, have someone walk thru it with nostalgic appreciation and maybe have them high five the tiny form model. And at the end of the line there are many many empty shelves stretching out into an infinite hallway. But then the museum curator turns to thr latest display to have something, covered with sheet, the curator then unveils the new iPad.
This is the latest in a long line of things people love and use to make their lives better, the newest link in a chain that goes on forever.
I was thinking more that you zoom out and the museum is inside the iPad. Family photos are one of the exhibits.
@@BlackCanary87 Also good.
Man, you're way too good at using nostalgia to invoke emotions. I felt things during the "Dad's Oldsmobile" bit, and my dad is still alive, and we never owned an oldsmobile.
The Gohan clip next to the ‘I remember my father’s Oldsmobile’ monologue was too much. Cried. 11/10
The apple ad works wonders in reverse. If an ipad in a grayscale background appears and all of these cozy artsy stuff come out of the ipad and fill the room with life and colors, it conveys the exact same message they wanted to convey without the inherint "AI is destroying artists" message that the actual ad is shouting
I actually found the ad unwatchable. Nice to see Bob articulate why I found it so unbearable.
It baffles me to think that ad got through however many rounds of approval it took to get made without _anyone_ flagging "Hey, hang on a minute ... don't you think symbolically crushing the life and joy out of multiple generations' childhoods might be a bit of a bad look?"
Wow blowing my mind that "not your father's X" comes form Oldsmobile.
My mom had one of the last Oldsmobiles before the brand dissolved in 04. Good reliable cars.
12:08 I just now noticed the classic Castlevania cover shirt you're wearing, Mr. Chipman. Apropos for this discussion.
To quote you from another review of yours:
"Intent good*, execution bad."
* "Good" really just meaning someone can see what the intent was.
I once made a 130 degree left turn in my dad's 86 Olds 98 going 64 mph while listening to Van Halen's Hot for Teacher. That thing was indestructible. Also, fuck Apple and thank you once again, Moviebob.
I'm at just the right age where that Oldsmobile ad campaign was my FIRST exposure to the brand (if my own dad ever owned an Oldsmobile, it was before I was born), so I remember it without having the visceral response to it that you describe.
But I also remember that the slogan had TWO parts for much of the campaign: "this is not your father's Oldsmobile" was followed by "this is the new generation of Olds." I think if they'd JUST used that bit without the first half, they'd have communicated exactly the message they were aiming for, complete with a clever play on words, without stomping on anyone's nostalgia. Most of these errors would be easily fixed if someone had just done some focus groups first...
Just the clips caused grievous bodily harm to my soul. Dog only knows what would have happened if I had encountered the full ad out in the wild. 😭
It was ok to crush the metronome, the metronome knows what it did! 😆
I mean, I HAVE seen this kind of ad done well before. Sony had an ad for Playstation (I think when the PS3 first came out?) where they had a Playstation suddenly explode with all these scenes of games and characters and stuff popping out of the console at the audience, then sucked back down into the Playstation that then bumps or glows or something to show it has all these worlds and stories and experiences all packed into the one thing they want you to buy. That ad works (or at least, doesn't completely fail) as visual storytelling because it's conveying "here's countless interesting stories, and (this is important) those stories you found interesting are STILL THERE, INTACT and ready for you to enjoy, so buy the thing, and you get all the stories." This ad doesn't show all the things becoming part of the tablet, the tablet just appears at the end, it *SHOWS* destruction of objects you might like in zoomed-in pornographic detail, then says here's a thing. It probably doesn't help that people are predisposed to hating Apple as a destroyer of creativity already, however, since, as with the political saying, a gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth and confirm what people always thought about you.
Apple said 'screw you and your tools and your memories', and everyone else told them to get bent.
Thanks for putting my general sense of "ugh, that was uncomfortable and sadistic" into words, Bob.
The iPad ad could have been done right. Just don't show the stuff getting crushed. Have a big steamroller bearing down on all the stuff. Let the tension build. Cut away, and play a wacky squishy sound effect. Then a shot behind the roller with no crushed debris, just the iPad, right in the center.
Bam, awesome visual, memorable as hell, and gets the point across.
Man, didn’t realize how many disturbing memories form my childhood involved things getting slowly lowered to be destroyed/compacted
The response to the Samsung ad was pretty visceral too. I thought that it was a sharp addition to the Samsung tradition of trolling Apple, but there are so many zealous, vocal, and influential Apple die-hards that it felt like the ad was DOA.
The assessment of this ad reminds me of the reveal trailer for Overkill’s The Walking Dead, which was a single shot of a wall, a door, and the light and shadows thrown by a window out of frame. It progresses through the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, but the part I found very upsetting was the little girl who bangs on the other side of the door, begging to be let in as the walkers crash in and devour her. Without seeing a thing, the sound of her terror, followed by her screams being cut off, and the sound of chewing left me scarred in a way I am unlikely to forget.
I would definitely watch a series where Bob talked about the weird history and marketing of cars.
Excuse me?
"THE" scary part of Brave Little Toaster???
Implying there werent a dozen
That wasn't even the bathtub scene
The flower! The f*cking FLOWER! WHY. IT WASN'T EVEN AN APPLIANCE.
AC dying...oof the AC dying
That was your best video so far! Well done!
The ad was annoying but not actually hateful to me until they showed a Gibson Sunburst guitar getting smashed in loving detail and just like OKAY NOW YOU ARE MY ENEMY HOW DARE YOU
26:05: I had to pause the video after this segment because I was laughing so hard. Because Bob absolutely nailed it. This segment alone is worth the price of admission.
As Jon Stewart might say, with a peculiar hand gesture.... "...Kudos."
You know when of the oldest Pokemon commercials did this thing, it at least had the gall to not show us the titular creatures get flattened in explicit detail and was presented in a cartoonish fashion for the end result. What's this trying to convey?
I just realized what I think maybe the original idea of this ad might have been, because I feel like I saw it on a food ad a long time ago. Can't remember what it was, probably Lunchables or Ritz Bits Sandwiches or Poptarts or something like that. I remember so little detail about it that I'm basically just making this up myself right now, but the vibe I recall was something like, showing an entire apple pie, steaming and well lit and delicious looking, and then it gets put into some kind of crushing machine, but you don't see it get crushed. Then the pressure plate lifts back up, and now it's an apple pie flavored poptart. Like, oh cool, it's like a lovely pie, but miniature and flat so it fits in your toaster.
I have a suspicion that something like I just described was the original pitch for this Apple ad, like 'let's show all this awesome stuff people love, then it all gets compressed and fused together, and the result is the new iPad Pro, so like the message is look the iPad Pro is ALL of that awesome stuff you love all at once." But then it got churned through the machinery of Executives and Marketing and Focus Groups and Corporate Management. Some middle manager dunce thought oh yeah we should make it like those hydraulic press videos. Some other idiot tells the artists make sure it's in super high detail, cuz that's cool looking. And so on down the chain until the result is what we got, utterly devoid of the original intention.
I started this video thinking 'why on earth should I care about a phone commercial, what an odd topic for a video " and wound up being fascinated and really, seriously thinking about the ideas presented. What a nice surprise! Well done, Movie Bob!
I got something out of almost every second from this one. I never knew of the ads until now, I never knew of Oldsmobile. And the dissection, explanation, and expressed similar reactive feeling to the subjects make me feel less alone in my head, if only a little.
A Cracking video, I'm interested on whom the obituary is about.
This is one of the most beautiful videos you’ve ever made. Extremely fantastic. I agree utterly.
…but it did make me think of that Pokémon ad from the 90s. Where the Pokémon are tricked onto a bus and then crushed into a game cartridge. I’m surprised that wasn’t brought up more as a comparison. I remember finding that ad upsetting, but also darkly funny. It seems so backwards to use that as a way to advertise a ‘companion animal’ game to kids, but it was so memorable. I have to wonder if the people behind his ad were thinking of that old classic one.
Thanks for putting it into coherent form...I felt general unease at the ad but couldn't quite out my finger on it...Thanks Bob
The worst bit about the apple bit, is that you can clearly see the thought process.
Somebody saw the numbers from last year about kids watching industrial presses.
Someone realized they could shoot this without paying for actors.
They probably already had the industrial press.
It’s all CG. There is no industrial press.
My 3 takes:
1. Dammmmn ALF
2. My first car was my Dad's 1978 Oldsmobile 88. I got T-boned in it by a person in a Ford Pinto, and we both walked away with minimal injuries - but both cars were totaled.
3. If Apple's intent was to suggest the new iPad could replace all that, the better idea would've been to cartoonishly funnel all those items into the new iPad, not destroy them. "You can carry around all of this is our new even smaller tablet!" Idiotic missed opportunity.
The irony for me is that the iPad with the Pencil stylus and Procreate drawing app is pretty much the toy I wanted my entire childhood. It's an incredible creative tool that I absolutely love working with, like literally the thing I wanted to exist for my entire childhood and now it does, how amazing. Surely there was a way to tell that story that... wasn't this.
7:33 - 7:55 I had to hear that part again, after being ordered to clear old stuff out of my brother's old bedroom before the walls and ceiling get painted again. The way my dad and his fiance said to "get rid of it" makes it sound like they find the mere existince of old things abhorrent and repugnant, and I don't think like that.
Good god, the ad just won't go away, everytime I try to forget about it, someone else brings it up or posts about it. I dont think I would have even heard about this Ipad
Perhaps in memory of Roger Corman you should cover one of his movies on This Movie Exists. Or doing a This Movie Exists on one of his movies as a follow up to a New Big Picture video about him. He did a lot of movies, was very influencial in the film industry, and one of his movies reviewed in the This Movie Exists style could serve as a case in point.
He could do a month’s worth of tribute including memorable Corman films, early work by directors who became stars, and overview of his importance to 1960s-90s film.
@@75aces97 he could also cover some of the films that Corman produced in the 80s and onwards.
@@jadedheartsz he could, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he does. I don’t know if I’d say Corman lost his touch after 1980, but he lost some knack for finding A+ young talent after a decade or so of launching his Coppola, Scorsese, Demme, Dante, Bogdanovich, Hanson, Sayles. Although after a run like that anything is going to look like a downgrade.
This commercial is exactly what happens when “disruptor bros” erupt from their mutual-appreciation cocaine clouds and try to impress normal people.
This felt like a case of two teams not talking to each other; one team comes up with the idea of things getting squished down into a smaller form (which can be achieved well if done in a cartoony style; look up the advert for 'Oompas' candy for an example) and then another team takes the idea and gets carried away making one of those destruction porn videos.
I didn't know that's where the expression "Not you Dad's...." came from. I'm honestly glad to know that. Thank you.
I had a hard time articulating my feelings on that Apple ad. I knew they were bad, icky feelings, but I couldn't articulate why. I could see what the idea behind ad was ("look at all the things the iPad can do") but I couldn't draw a line between that and the visuals, and couldn't explain why. Thank you for helping me organize my thoughts
I was talking to one of my film school professors who showed this ad in his class with no lead in explanation whatsoever and from what he told me some students actually yelled they were so pissed off. I swear to Odin I am not making this up, it started actual angry comments from the class.
I still have a typewriter my mom gave me from when I was 10 years old, I still have an action figure my best friend bought me over 15 years ago. Objects matter, they form a physical connection to our memories.
And as much as Steve Jobs was a maniacal sociopath who took credit for the work of others, even he would've hated this ad because it's soulless as hell.
I don't see this as the fault of technology though, I see it as greed and that greed causing ignorance. They don't want us to throw out or memories because they think their new device is better, they want us to do it because they want us to pay them as opposed to having those collectables and physical memories. Technology isn't whats destroying us or is going to. It's corporate greed that will and is currently doing it.
For 100 years we were told that when "The Rite of Spring" debuted in Paris, the audience rioted. Whether that actually happened or not, it's become accepted as a metaphor for the new replacing the old. You know, "revolutionary". Or as we would put it today, "disruption". It's what came to my mind the first time I saw "Close (To The Edit) Version 1" on MTV. Apple may have been attempting to send the same message. Whether they succeeded or not is up for debate.
Maybe if the dancers dressed up as old timey Russian peasants in The Rite Of Spring were ritually sacrificing some traditional-looking classical ballerinas...
I can't believe Apple stole this add from Pokemon red and blue bus. Which is known for being a awful shocking add where a creepy bus driver lures cute cartoon animals into bus and into a trash compactor and we watch the pokemon panic like any reasonable person would trying to get out. All while the bus driver rings his hands evilly revealing he compressed the bus into a gameboy the pokemon want out from.