Friday, August 19, 2011

I guess the O'Jays just needed the money?



Right away, it is revealed that the idiots at Coors Lite have never, EVER utilized public transportation. The MOMENT the train stops, the announcer comes on the intercom to announce in clear, non-muffled, non-garbled, non-accented English that the riders "will experience a thirty-minute delay."

Not ten minutes of silence followed by a barely-intelligible, static-filled "we will be moving momentarily." Not a "thank you for your patience" followed by a silent request for MORE patience. Nope, an INSTANT declaration of EXACTLY how long this train filled with twenty-something models will be stuck in one place.

As a regular customer on the DC/MD/VA Metrorail, I can only respond "Yeah, RIGHT!!"

The Very Beautiful People, who are clearly not used to being inconvenienced in the slightest, quickly express dismay at this interruption in their plans to Go Someplace Very Important And Look Beautiful There. (Tell me you don't want to just slap the Very Beautiful and Very Put Out Woman who mysteriously has not been offered a freaking SEAT on this train- she looks as though she is QUITE sure the freaking universe revolves around her and the other Very Beautiful People with her exaggerated gesture of exasperation- and how DARE a mere mechanical issue get in the way of her Very Important Schedule??)

Ah, but let's not forget that these are, after all, Very Beautiful People. They are not nameless, faceless slobs like you or me (well, me.) A Male Very Beautiful Person applies a bottle cap to the wall of the train, instantly transforming what was once merely the preferred vehicle of the poor and very poor alike into the Coors Lite PartyMobile, to the great gratification of the other Very Beautiful People, who mysteriously know exactly which Very Beautiful Person to thank for remembering that he is, after all, a Very Beautiful Person, and Very Beautiful People simply do not live by the same laws of physics and nature that the rest of us trolls (well, me, anyway) do. When I'm stuck on a train in the middle of the summer, I'm going to sit and sweat and stew, and mentally pound the skulls of the slack-jawed jackasses with their MP3 players and pointless, noise-leaking ear buds as I slowly die of thirst. Not THESE people.

So the train is suddenly filled with ice cold beer and very happy passengers, and the Very Beautiful, Stunningly Impatient Woman naturally hooks up with the Magic Bringer of Beer (he knows how to push her buttons, clearly.) Hey, someone's got to pay for all this, right? I mean, wouldn't it be incredibly unfair if the Very Beautiful Impatient Woman was indifferent to the Magic Beer Guy with the requisite three-day beard stubble, gelled hair and open shirt?

I'd love to see an SNL parody of this ad. For one thing, are there really no people on this train who don't drink beer? Alcoholics? Children? How about people who still have work to do- meetings, presentations, sales, all that stuff I understand that people who are not teachers have to do to make money? Also, why does the exterior of the train have to undergo any transformation at all- beer cannot be served in a standard metro car? Are the all-but-universal No Alcohol On Public Transportation laws suspended when a Magic Bottle Cap is used to provide beer for the Very Beautiful People? Or does Coors Lite simply not count as "alcohol?" ( I could almost buy this.)

A while back, I kept meaning to do a post on the original "Love Train" (man, it's so sad that a song released in the 1970s calling for World Peace could be hijacked and used to sell crappy beer, isn't it?) commercial, which featured a train loaded with beer crashing through a football stadium as snowflakes provided magical relief to the fans in the stands. The use of stock footage from NFL films, complete with people long dead or at least unaware that their participation (or even observation) of a freaking football game would someday be used to peddle alcohol really, really rubbed me the wrong way. At least the current versions of the whole "Love Train" (please stop) campaign use model/actors and not innocent bystanders, but still....I really can't comprehend wanting to guzzle light beer on a crowded, stalled, hot train with a bunch of strangers, and I'm really bored with the "Beer makes every situation not only tolerable, but Awesome" attitude of these commercials.

But then, that's only been the message of beer commercials since the 1960s. We've got to be moving that train along soon, right?

2 comments:

  1. I do know what the message of all beer ads is; I also know that beer tells me that I can't stand up without watching the room spin around me and it's right to do so.

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  2. The sports bar is the latest drug. This train ideally becomes a sports bar, perverted by the notion that everyone at a sports bar looks good and that there is even enough available light to arrive at that assessment. Most Americans have never even been on a commuter train or municipal railway. The fantasy is that all metropolitan transit systems on rails mimics the state of New York's MTA in 1977, where track fires, power outages, and basic breakdowns had become the norm. It's a childish view of what's out there, combined with the immature notion that the only pleasure left in life is getting drunk on cheap beer and on the flicker-free imagery of High Definition Televised sports, in multiples of five. Coors has never been the preferred drink of poets, historians, and philosophers. This I do know.

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