“Chicken Dance (Remix)” – McDonald’s

“I believe the children are our future.” – Whitney Houston

“I weep for the future.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

“The Breakfast Club ’08″ – J.C. Penney

Dear J.C. Penney,

We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole minute of our lives for whatever it was we did wrong, but we think you’re crazy to make us watch a commercial telling us to buy your clothes. You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions of consumers. But what we found out is that each one of us is:

- remembering that the movie you are parodying is from 1985, before any of the actors in the commercial were even born, not to mention every teenager in the world.

- aware of the fact that The Breakfast Club is an R-rated movie and shouldn’t even have been seen by anyone under the age of 17, your target consumer.

- offended that you would replace the five central characters of the movie with an undetermined amount of actors including a black girl with a chihuahua who serves no purpose other than to highlight diversity and doesn’t even show up in any of the group shots.

- shocked that you would substitute some generic faux-punk version of “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” for the Simple Minds original.

- disgusted that you would actually take a movie whose central theme is showing that people are more than just labels and stereotypes and turn it into a commercial TRYING to get kids to buy into your brand name and dress in the same, uniform preppy style to conform.

Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours, noncommercial

If you’d like to find out more about just how seriously J.C. Penney takes this, go to their website: http://www.jcpbrands.com/getthatlook/

While there, you can get to know each of the NINE characters from the commercial, play games based on the commercial, and buy the soundtrack to the commercial from iTunes.

“Cholesterol” – Honey Nut Cheerios

There are two kinds of bad commercials in this world. The first is those commercials that are based on a terrible idea and are going to be bad no matter what you do. The GEICO Cavemen commercials are the perfect example of this. Some of the ideas might be funny and they might even become popular enough to form the basis of a short-lived TV show, but the commercials are never going to be “good”. You could even cast Robert DiNero and Joe Pesci in them, but at the end of the day you are still going to have a commercial of cavemen making meta-references to cavemen selling car insurance. The second type of commercials is those that should be perfectly acceptable, but because of the wrong decision someone made, they turn out bad. If you just fix that one variable, you’ll have people running out to the store to buy your product. Having said that, this commercial for Honey Nut Cheerios falls squarely in that second category.

Writing out a description of this commercial wouldn’t alert you to the fact that anything is wrong with it. A woman is told by her doctor that she needs to lower her cholesterol so she eats Honey Nut Cheerios. A man’s wife insists he eats whole grain oats which is why he chooses Honey Nut Cheerios. A man is told that eating certain foods, including Honey Nut Cheerios, will lower his cholesterol. See? Even reading over a script to this commercial wouldn’t set off any alarms. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with what the people are saying. So what is the problem? The way the people in the commercial actually say it.

“Conference Call” / “Airport” – Eclipse Gum

Have you ever met someone and just instantly known they were an asshole? Maybe it was the way they were dressed or something they said but you just knew that they were a dick, just like that. We all know people like that, but unfortunately they will have to take a backseat today because there’s someone out there who’s an even bigger douche than they are. Not only that, you may have met him before due to the fact that he’s a character in a commercial. He is part of the advertisements for Eclipse Gum and he is also quite possibly the biggest asshole in all of history.

“Mooch” – P’Zone / Pizza Hut

First, this isn’t so much as one commercial but a series of commercials featuring the same actors, but for the sake of discussion I’ll primarily be talking about one of them. Second, this commercial is absurd not just for its content, but for the fact that it won’t go away. It first began airing during 2007 but it’s now back in the summer of 2008. The P’Zone itself wasn’t new, but had disappeared for awhile and was making a return. Pizza Hut loves to do this: introduce a product, advertise it like crazy for awhile, then make it disappear only to bring it back months or years later. In fact, more than likely by next year no one will even remember what a P’Zone was. But what is a P’Zone?

“UR A PIG!” – LG Shine / AT&T

This commercial starts in the middle of a sentence. “Work’s so crazy right now. Fashion week’s coming up…” Obviously we don’t need an introduction. These aren’t characters, they are real people, celebrities, so we don’t have to waste time getting to know them. Lauren Conrad and Brody Jenner from MTV’s The Hills. But even if you don’t know who they are, the commercial manages to completely bring you up to speed on their personalities and everything you need to know about them in less than 30 seconds. They are vapid and shallow, and we should want to be like them by buying the phone they use.