Don’t know if others have the same feeling, but there’s an Edge shaving cream commercial out there in heavy rotation that I find monumentally irksome, wherein the invigorating effects of said product’s scent are portrayed by a group of miniature women with jet-packs who fly up the nose of a guy slathering on shaving cream for his morning face-scrape. There, inside his nasal cavity, they dance about, underneath a disco ball (?!), seemingly having the time of their lives.
I’ve seen this commercial a dozen times, maybe more, and it’s made me realize just how strongly I don’t find anything appealing or funny, regardless of the set-up, about scenes in which shrunken humans and/or insects enter the body through a nostril — something the recent animated flick Fly Me to the Moon reconfirmed, with its bizarre, stupid joke about Grandpa Fly having once saved Amelia Earhart’s life by buzzing up her nose while she was dozing off during her transatlantic flight. Not content to merely feed audiences a cringe-inducing joke (“That was one serious booger!”), the 3-D movie gives us a flashback too, in which the intrepid, duster-clad fly does his thing and is sneezed out. Gross. It’s a low point in a movie with plenty of valleys, and was greeted with derision by most of the many youngsters with whom I saw the G-rated film.
Two things:
1) If you’ve seen that commercial a dozen times or more, you aren’t using your TiVo correctly.
2) Of course they do a flashback. You don’t write that joke and NOT go for the flashback. These are professional writers. I think they may know a litle more about when to put in a 3-D fly up Earheart’s nose flashback than you do, sir. How many 3-D animated flys on a trip to the moon movies have you written? Let me amend that, how many 3-D animated fly movies have you written that you were able to convince other people to spend money on, and how many 3-D animated fly movies with a flashback to a nostril have you gotten passed through the hands and computerized innards of animators?
Not to get all Biff Tannen, but think, McFly! Think!