The Dude and Carrie Bradshaw
US TV

When Carrie Bradshaw met The Dude

This year’s Superbowl is fast-approaching in the US, so expect a lot of high-profile, highly expensive ads to start hitting the YouTubes. First up, we have an unexpected meeting between Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw and The Big Lebowski‘s The Dude, both of whom have decided to forego their normal tipples in favour of Stella Artois this year.

This isn’t quite a one-off, as Carrie (well, Sarah Jessica Parker) also recently recreated the title sequence of Sex and the City for the company’s ‘Pour it forward’ clean water campaign:

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Cinematic Dell
Commercials

‘If it’s made for a cinematic experience’ – it’s not, Dell. Don’t be silly

Dell has a new advert for ‘Dell Cinema’ – basically, a good display, sound system and WiFi card – that deserves a good nitpick, because it’s even more nonsense than most ads:

  1. “If it’s made for a cinematic experience”. That’s a picture of Netflix’s Stranger Things. It was made for TV, not the cinema.
  2. “It’s made for Dell”. If it had been made for a cinematic experience, that would be found in the cinema, not on a laptop with a 13″ screen.
  3. “Screen images simulated”. You can’t even see how good Dell Cinema is from the ad. Sure, I’ll just take it on trust then.
Hewlogram
Classic TV

Fancy a belated pastiche of Automan that also doubles as an advert for some computer software?

Automan aired in 1983. A buddy-buddy cop dramedy, in which one of the buddies happened to be a computer-generated hologram who was friends with Pac-man and Donkey Kong, it was one of Glen A Larson’s long line of sci-fi action cop dramas that peppered the 80s. However, it didn’t last as long as Knight Rider and has largely disappeared into both obscurity and people’s childhood memories. Or their DVD collections.

Oddly, though, today seems to be a day for US TV shows of the 80s to be making a comeback and we’ve just had the release of Hewlogram, a pastiche of Automan that stars David Hewlett (Stargate: Atlantis). It’s a surprisingly accurate parody of the first episode of the show, as well as a good recreation of the show’s look and its title sequence. There are even guest appearances at the end by both Automan himself Chuck Wagner and Cursor.

Why is this happening, 34 years after the show aired? Well, the guy with Hewlett is Aharon Rabinowitz, the head of marketing for a software company called Red Giant, and the whole thing is a big ad for the company’s Red Giant Universe 2.2 visual effects tool. Still, I won’t begrudge it that. It’s actually pretty funny.

[via]