Broadcast: 6 November 2012
Program: Cyclops
Channel: SyFy
Conglomerates: Comcast & General Electric
Advertiser: Crizal
Owned By: Essilor
Pitch: Invincible lenses for your glasses mean that you don’t need glasses.
[Programming Note: Box Score Cinema for Bond 24 will be delayed until tomorrow morning.]
One of the fun parts of low budget programming, like a movie on SyFy about a giant CGI cyclops who has to battle his way out of a Roman gladiatorial arena, is equally low budget commercials. It is in that spirit that we get this odd, poorly animated, one trick, first person viewer of a commercial for specialty eyeglass lenses.
We begin by looking out onto a rain soaked street as a hand (male and white, naturally) puts on a pair of glasses:
There’s an ammo pack hidden behind that pillar during multiplayer matches.
It’s all pretty much the same from here on out. On the left we have the “ordinary lens” and on the right we have the miracle lens, and in the lower right we have the “Dramatization” disclaimer to let you know that the rest of this is, in fact, completely made up. Not too surprisingly, the lens on the left is instantly covered in blurry rain drops while the lens on the right is spotless and perfect. This pattern will repeat itself. The narration:
Just look at the difference a Crizal lens can make on your sight. Neither rain, nor snow, nor dust, nor dirt, nor smudge, nor scratches, nor glare of night, can keep your lenses from giving you the clearest vision possible.
As the narrator hits each obstacle (snow, dust, dirt, etc.) we switch to a new scene, each with its own distinct flavor of poorly done computer graphics. First, snow, complete with a bratty kid hitting him square in the monocles with a snowball:
Then comes dust and dirt, which is maybe the worst one since the commercial appears to think there is a sandstorm worthy of the Sahara occurring in this not-at-all-desertified downtown:
Then comes smudges and scratches, represented here by this guy’s inability to protect his face from a beach ball thrown by a toddler:
And finally, “glare of night”, which sounds like a cool noir detective movie but is, in fact, our first person guy standing by a railing with an attractive woman who looks appropriately upper middle class:
Through each of these scenes we see ugly smudges on the left lens while the right remains perfectly clear. What makes the whole thing even more low rent than it already is, however, is the way that the view through the right lens is identical to the view outside of them.
I get why they did that, you wouldn’t want most of your image to be blurry nothingness, but once you notice it, a cheap nonsensical commercial becomes even cheaper and more nonsensical. Nevermind the crappy CGI, nevermind the hokey and fatuous locations, nevermind that this guy’s kids throw shit at his face with alarming regularity, the clarity they’re explicitly holding up – in a comparison they came up with themselves – is dwarfed by the overwhelming majority of screen real estate taken up by something that isn’t their product. Of course, when you’re advertising on Cyclops on the SyFy channel you can probably assume that the audience isn’t paying details that much attention anyway, but still.
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