TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#07 – Infomercials

So, last week I was engaging in my usual habit of yelling at the television. Yes, I know that they can?t hear me and that some feel that yelling at TV?s is a beginning stage of mental illness. It?s my only defense to their subtle attempts to brainwash me into buying their service and/or product. It?s all so perfectly timed, you can almost hear them whispering it over the background music: ?You?re not like your friends if you don?t own a Chevy.? ?You?re a bad parent if you don?t buy your child Jif peanut butter.? ?People who are real individuals wear Levi?s jeans.? On and on and on. Infomercials are the worst of them, and this leads me to my latest rant.

Is it me, or does Ron Popeil look like the missing link? Let?s face it, one look at that guy and you?re doing flashbacks of Phil Hartman doing the ?Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer? bit for Saturday Night Live. I?m getting off topic. What really bothers me are those half-hour long commercials masquerading as informational shows to convince you that they?re selling the best product known to man; a claim that?s spurious at best. It?s always the same ?Before (insert product here), you always had to do this: (Black and white shot of someone agonizing over performing menial task, such as scrubbing shower tile or cleaning out the gutters). But now (smash cut to color visual of stupid product) you?ve got (insert product name here)!? The infomercials never attempt to get smarter. ?Let?s go to Ron Popeil and (poor sap being the straight man to Ron for a thousand bucks) in the Popeil test kitchen now.? I don?t know about you, but I?ve never been in an actual working kitchen that features bleachers of seats filled with people clapping as you demonstrate a rotisserie oven. The video production values look like they?ve been time-warped to 1986, is it a little too much to ask that the computer graphics look like been done on something more advanced than a Commodore Amiga?

Let?s get back to the person playing the host of the show. It?s not just Ron Popeil, Cathy Mitchell, the pitchman (or pitchperson ? geez, you?re so PC) of the Turbo Cooker, seems to be having totally in love with its inventor ?Chef Randall?. (By the way, I?m a little confused, does anyone else know of someone whose first name is Chef?) I also take to task the guy who does the straight-man act, he practically has a religious experience every time he tastes something made from the Turbo Cooker. They didn?t demonstrate ham on that thing because there was plenty of it already going on in the studio.

Playing the straight man looks like an easy job to me. You just have to follow Ron or Cathy or whomever, look confused as they talk about the problem (you know?everything they sell is supposed to solve a problem?get it?) and say really idiotic things like, &quotWait (persons name), I don?t understand. You mean to say that I can blah blah blah with your blah blah blah?" to which they reply &quotYes, Tim, you really can blah blah blah!" and I lead the audience in hand-clapping. I bet I could get that job. And then I?d hate myself. So would you?but that?s another subject.

I?ve taken each of the never-ending cast of infomercial products with a grain of salt. They?ve got these things down to a science, now. I?d just as soon they sell these products in a real store, not on television leaving time for the shows that really matter, like World?s Scariest Police Videos.