Welcome to Ad-Surdity: Sprite!

Hello Everybody. Welcome in.

I'm always talking, on my couch, about the real messages that ads on TV put forward. Things that are perhaps unintentional, but the kind of interpretation that someone without nuance in culture or metaphor might take away. This is a piss poor explanation. I'm a lot better at show writing than tell writing (all those creative writing professors telling me to show, not tell, I guess I absorbed it).

Today, we're gonna talk about Sprite's commercial with Benajmin Pacheco's "Falling Away" (falsely attributed to Evermore). If you're not familiar, let's have a look-see.


In this commercial, some guys step up to a basketball court in some very clean, multicultural city somewhere that could be anywhere, but clearly isn't anywhere in the US that you've actually been (That's cause it's Bangkok... been there, it's nuts). A skinny white kid drinks a Sprite. He pulls off his shirt, and takes a back flip into the hard pavement of the urban basketball court. But, rather than suffer either:
a: an injury requires spinal traction


or

b: a massive head wound (Sorry for the small picture, couldn't find a good one)


At least, those are the outcomes you'd expect. But no. As you saw, he fell through the pavement, which parted for him as if it were liquid. Now, I know it's hot in Bangkok (remember, I've been. It's nuts), but it's not so hot as to render pavement liquid. How are we to understand this. There are really two conclusions that someone who doesn't take a large amount of drugs (and therefore working as a creative person at an ad agency) can come to are:

a: Sprite induces hallucinations while deadening nerves to massive abrasions and blunt trauma (a guy does a back belly flop into hard pavement after hanging off a ten foot basketball rim).

or

b: Something about the combination Sprite consumption, youth and Bangkok sunlight and humidity is able to render oddly colored pavement basketball courts liquid.

Since one of those clearly violates the laws of physics, and the other is clearly the easier explanation of what we've seen. So, clearly, the FDA needs to take action, and look at what's going into Sprite.

If you want to contact the FDA about potentially tainted Sprite, contact the district office consumer complaint coordinator for your geographic area.