August 19, 2008


No

I do not like this new United Airlines commercial at all. I find its imagery profoundly disturbing on some visceral level.

And there’s no organ in “Rhapsody in Blue.”

comments

14 Responses to “No”

  1. Kathy Hilen-Smith on August 19th, 2008 at 11:38 am

    But you get psilocybian mushrooms and a little package of dry-roasted peanuts.

  2. Deron Bauman on August 19th, 2008 at 11:44 am

    have a nice trip.

  3. Beau on August 19th, 2008 at 11:51 am

    This is by far my favorite commercial from the Olympics. I think it’s gorgeous.

  4. Daryl Scroggins on August 19th, 2008 at 11:52 am

    Is that Robert Redford narrating this thing?

  5. Mike Dresser on August 19th, 2008 at 11:56 am

    “Bah humbug,” he added, smacking a sucker from a toddler’s hand.

    It’s pretty, just…not what I expected to see when I looked up past the laptop.

  6. Tiffany Smith on August 19th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

    It’s people like you who make such shenanigans necessary. You can’t expect the poor television to compete with your laptop without going to extremes!

  7. Cindy Scroggins on August 19th, 2008 at 1:02 pm

    Think how much better it would be with some cowbell.

  8. Lenka Reznicek on August 19th, 2008 at 2:32 pm

    Fascinating - I thought the same thing about this commercial, and I also can’t quite place my finger on what I find disturbing about it. It actually does remind me of an animation version of the room-sized Rube Goldberg-esque “music machines” at the House On The Rock in Spring Green, Wisconsin, made with elaborate figurines, lights, bells and whistles on automated organ mechanisms.

  9. Doc on August 19th, 2008 at 4:05 pm

    c’est fantastique!
    absolutely flawless animation…

    and yes - redford is reading the end tag.

  10. Sheila Ryan on August 20th, 2008 at 7:31 am

    It calls to mind the second “Pirates of the Caribbean” film. Something to think about on the next flight out of LAX, for instance — when the plane makes that swing out over the ocean. Davy Jones’s Locker.

  11. Amanda Mae Meyncke on August 20th, 2008 at 10:25 am

    The more organ in the world, the BEST.

    Also, has a weirdly Victorian feel to it, can’t put my finger on why.

  12. Dave Vogt on August 20th, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    Disney’s The Little Mermaid?

  13. Sheila Ryan on August 20th, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    I’m beginning to see what Amanda Mae is getting at with respect to the “weirdly Victorian feel” — but it feels weirdly Victorian by way of David Cronenberg to me. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

    But it doesn’t especially make me want to fly United.

  14. Mike Dresser on August 21st, 2008 at 5:46 am

    One thing I just noticed, re-watching it: though they make some effort to blur objects in the distant background (obscuring them with some fog-like haze), the depth of focus is stretches unnaturally far off into the distance. Being able to pick out tiny details at distance is, especially to this myopic observer, a bit freaky.

    On the whole, I’m reminded of paper cut-outs, like a children’s pop up book. Or Monty Python.

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