It's gone from suck...to BLOW!
Posted on 09/11/2005 6:46:54 PM PDT by Jack Black
I have been watching NFL football today, one of my few TV viewing vices. The games were great, especially the Lions finally winning an opener in a convincing fashion. However throughout the games, on those channels as well as several others I watched are these totally vulgar ads.
For those of you who have not seen them the theme is that 'cable TV sucks'. The visuals involve various things being sucked onto the TV screen, shoes, one old mans clothes except for his underwear, etc.
Most parents I know have worked diligently to help our kids understand what words and phrases are not popular. Certainly in our house 'sucks' has always been a bad word. After all most of us know that 'sucks' is short for a description of a common sex act.
So this is where we are at. One of the largest TV providers thinks it's cleaver to use gutter slang for sex acts as the tag line for their saturation bombing ad campaign.
Well, I'm not sure about you, but I think I'll stick with my cable, thanks very much. Dish Network, no thanks.
I don't have to. Comcast is known as Comcrap for a reason.
Well Jack, from the posts you have readily discerned those with and those without class, those that such ads were generated towards.
I agree that some of the worst commercials are the ED ones. Two people in two tubs overlooking a river valley? The man playing "peek-a-boo" with the woman? Who did you think it was, idiot?
I also agree that the "Bob" ads are campy and fun, but I have a 14 year old who stays up late enough to see it. He doesn't need to.
Finally, I appreciate your feelings about TV, but the Dish offers as much -- if not more -- of the programming that is repulsive on the airwaves.
But that's just my opinion.
Maintaining decorum in a school yard and teaching proper manners to children is one thing and I applaud you for what you are doing. However, there is no right to not be offended, no matter how much the liberals say there is.
The language ebbs and flows - "sucks" was edgy and laced with innuendo 30 years ago - now it is routinely used by even the nicest church kids for any situation in which something is unpleasant - it's taken on a life of it's own, essentially divorced from its original context. This happens all the time - I can remember a prim and proper English teacher talking in class about someone "shooting their whole wad" - like she didn't have a clue what that expression meant, and I don't think she did. There are all kinds of words and phrases we use without a thought that someone 50 or 100 years ago would have thought were utterly vulgar.
It's gone from suck...to BLOW!
LOL!!! I know what you mean. I thought we were going to be better off with Charter after we moved - boy was I wrong. At least with Comcast, I had a local number and cuold get a live person on the phone - Charter just one day switched all their numbers and no local numbers were available. To talk to a human I had to drive 20 miles to one office or 30 miles to the other.
We've only had the dish about 6 weeks - but so far no complaints - and I was already wishing for Comcast back after the first 6 weeks of Charter.
It's a gambling expression - nothing vulgar about it, unless you find gambling vulgar.
Sucks is kind of low on the totem pole of vulgar words. And though I admit I hang out with a vulgar crowd, suck is usually just in reference to a lame situation. It of course can be modified with certain gestures though, but so can many words.
Do you get offended when the weather man says to expect the wind to be blowing hard today?
When disco music swept the nation and started outselling rock-and-roll records, with Donna Summer hitting the cover of Newsweek and the Village People adorning the cover of Rolling Stone, the backlash was vicious from rockers. "DISCO SUCKS!" was written in hallways in my high school. I remember the controversy when "suck" crossed the "family hour" barrier on network TV, when a pre-teen boy on the 1990 CBS sitcom Uncle Buck. There was an outcry then, but there hasn't been since.
I believe I am on solid footing when I say that you have seen this commercial on pay TV (either cable or satellite), and not on public broadcast TV. There are often two versions of major ad campaigns nowadays: the broadcast version, and the pay TV version. For example, there are two versions of the controversial Miller Lite commercials with the hot chicks jumping into a fountain and ripping each others clothes off; in the broadcast version, seen on the networks and local channels, the spot ends with the women wrestling in wet cement. In the pay TV version, the blond chick sits up in the wet cement and purrs to the Amerasian chick, "Let's make out!"
hehehehe!
I still hate them for destroying TechTV to promote G4, their stupid video game channel. Now I gotta watch their Outdoor Life Network to see NHL Hockey.
Dumb. Makes me pine for the "Dick and Dirk" ads that ran a few years ago.
It's the creative team -- and the agency -- trying to be "cutting edge."
It's the clients' marketing department trying to "break through the clutter."
It's the stations lowering their standards to increase advertising revenue.
And it's led by people like Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the writers for "Will and Grace," "Sex and the City" and "The Real World" who are doing all they can to boost ratings.
I couldn't even tell you what channel/network any of them are on. I've heard of them but have never seen any of them - and that is the point. If you don't like something TURN IT OFF. If you don't like a company's ad campaign tell the company to change it.
It's called CHOICE - a much hated word around here - but it is reality.
Has anyone said it yet??
The Clinton Legacy lives on!
But nothing sucks like an Electrolux...:)
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