I just watched an ad for Orville Redenbacher popcorn, starring Orville… well, not really. It starred a rather hideous imitation of Orville, who was a genuine person who passed away about a decade back. They made a point of having him show off his MP3 player, clearly to emphasize that this was not old footage of the man… not that it would have been much of a question to anyone who saw this creepy depiction that evinced none of the charm that the real Orville was capable of.
Look, if they want to sell Orville Redenbacher’s Zombie’s Popcorn, they should promote it as such. As it is, I don’t see where this ad will have any appeal to those who don’t remember Orville, and it seems apt to disgust those who do remember him.
Orville Wrong
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I didn’t realize that was a lookalike actor… my first thought the iPod moment was “Look at what we can do with modern technology and old film footage!” Either way, it’s creepy and that’s a pretty unappetizing ad.
It’s not an actor. It’s three actors underlying a lot of digital work, all of which fails to seem human.
I wasn’t that thrilled when Harlan Sanders was turned into a rappin’ cartoon, but at least that was clearly animated, clearly wasn’t supposed to be the real guy. This is just a hideous mockery.
I can’t look at this ad without being totally amazed that thiw went through any kind of vetting process without somebody thinking what an awful idea this was. There are any number of alternate ways they could have gone to bring him back, either just running old commercials or an animated version would have been so much better.
Yeah, the whole “people bought popcorn when they saw the old ads, maybe they want to see his corpse filled with robot parts and bounced around in a hideous mockery of life” logic escaped me.