“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.