So, now you can beat up/kill a flash cartoon of Osama bin Laden, the man who, we are told, masterminded the 911 attacks and get a free X-Box 360. How could any patriotic American resist beating up/killing a cartoon version of a mass-murderer?
There are so many layers of cynicism, I'm not sure where to begin.
1) Trivializing the man who was behind the killing of 3000 American souls on 911 trivializes the deaths of those 3000 souls, too. After Spielberg made Raiders of the Lost Ark he learned more about the Nazis and what they did. Spielberg came to regret making such horrible people into cartoon badguys. Charlie Chaplin said the same thing after he made the film The Great Dictator which made Hitler out to be a fool. Chaplin would later regret doing so upon learning about the true atrocities of the Holocaust.
2) In the ad, we can choose to either beat up Osama or shoot him with a gun, making us, in a small way, his judge, jury and executioner, with the emphasis on the last bit. Combine this with all of the other killing imagery in our society and you lose just a little more respect for the legal system that needs to prove someone guilty and until then he or she is assumed to be innocent. Osama doesn't get that right since he's a sand nigger, apparently. Just because the USG tells me Osama did it, I'd still like to see the evidence in a court of law. And no, I don't trust videos or recordings Osama has made. It's not my place to judge him, it's a court of law's place.
3) Then there's the fact that trivializing Osama as a cartoon makes us less critical of an administration that can't catch the real Osama. On some level an ad like this encourages the individual to feel that they've already taken care of Osama, so who cares if authorities actually catch him for real? (Yes, this is a subtle thing, but it's still worth noting, in my opinion.)
4) *details apply. What this little note at the bottom of the ad does is "save" the ad's sponsors from any accusation of false advertising. See, if you beat up or shoot cartoon Osama you don't actually get a free X-Box 360. Instead, you get forwarded to a site that requires you to complete an offer for a credit card, Blockbuster Video by mail or some other offer requiring you to drop some of your hard-earned cash for something you probably wouldn't want to spend money on in the first place. Once you do this, you then have to convince a stack of your friends to do similar offers. This takes months to do and sometimes it never happens. It took me a year to get enough friends to do the offers to get my "free" Nintendo DS.
So, yeah, this ad is wrong on so many levels.
Slightly off the point, but Spielberg didn't know just how bad Nazis were until AFTER he made Raiders??? WTF, he was practically forty! XD
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure of exactly when he learned what, but I do remember him admitting that he had regrets about making the Nazis out to be cartoon badguys. And of course, Chaplin could be forgiven since no one really knew how far Hitler would go.
ReplyDeleteHe means "bad" as in good, like "shake your booty" means to wiggle one's butt!
ReplyDeleteThere's a Doritos commercial out right now with a killer on it used for advertizing...Godzilla!!! O and movies and games where you kill nazis allways sell good. tons of war games an the movie hellboy and tons of comics!
ReplyDeleteThat's all true, but does that make it right?
ReplyDeleteI mean, ditch your morals and killing real humans is probably a brilliant time.
Of course, you have to ditch your morals.