Celebrity endorsements are sort of a gamble, when you think about it. Sure, it made sense at the time for Texas Instruments to get a big shot like Bill Cosby to advertise their computers, but history hasn’t exactly been a friend to that decision. I mean, it’s not like TI is still selling home computers, but still. The point is that celebrities are human beings, and human beings are, let’s be honest here, kind of a crapshoot. Do you really want your brand tied to one fallible person and their potentially terrible decisions?
It doesn’t even have to be a celebrity, either. Noted sandwich-assembly firm Subway reached out to just some regular slob who willingly put himself on a diet almost exclusively composed of Subway sandwiches, and I think we all remember how that turned out. I never trusted that dude. There was always something off about that sandwich-gorged creep.
Anyway, the point is, why risk it with real people? They’re a hazard! A much better plan is to use tiny people and animals made out of clay or plasticine or something similar. Spokespeople made of such materials are far less likely to commit sexcrimes or say something racist to a waiter or anything like that. Renault understood this, and for their 2003 advertising campaign for the Kangoo, they made a wise decision:
That’s right, they chose Wallace and Gromit to do their commercial, all but guaranteeing that there would be no sex scandals to tarnish their brand image.
Interestingly, I think the Kangoo kind of fits the whole Wallace and Gromit/Aardman aesthetic; while Wallace’s usual choice of car is a hard-working Austin A35 van, seen in multiple guises over the years:
… I think that a Renault Kangoo at least sort of feels like a modern take on that old British sort of work van. I mean, just look at the Kangoo – it has a similar sort of pleasingly dorky aesthetic as the old Austin work van:
It’s utilitarian and a little bulbous and friendly, all at once. If I had to place Wallace and Gromit into something modern-ish, a Kangoo feels like a pretty reasonable choice.
Now, the ad is interesting in that there’s a little bit of a bait and switch going on, at least when we first see the Kangoo:
That’s a Kangoo, all right, but there’s something a bit off. All those rivets. I’m pretty sure Renault’s manufacturing process is a lot less rivet-heavy than that. But I can think of someone who has a far more rivet-focused manufacturing process:
…and, of course, the truth is soon revealed in the ad:
So, if I’m understanding this properly, Wallace has constructed what looks to be a very Yunickian 7/8ths or so scale Kangoo and a special treadmill assembly for testing purposes. I know Wallace tends to overcomplicate things and find reasons to build elaborate machinery like this, but I still feel a test drive at his local Renault dealership may have been a better use of time. I mean, maybe? I suppose the treadmill driving sim could be used for almost any car, so maybe it actually is a pretty good use of time. Who’s to say?
I do like that Renault had a non-riveted Kangoo model made for the ad, though still with slightly cartoony proportions, making multiple levels of meta reality going on here.
Really, it’s all pretty delightful. And kind of makes me want a Renault Kangoo and an Austin A35 van.
Now, enjoy the pleasingly overdramatic The Wrong Trousers trailer:
I mean, it’s not like TI is still selling home computers.
No they ended up literally giving them away for $49.95 with a $50 rebate, then IIRC $45 with a $50 rebate.
I had one. My parents bought it for me with dreams of a lucrative future in computer programming. Unfortunately their plan backfired, That POS was what turned me off programming altogether. I spend most of a weekend typing in the BASIC code for a slot machine game. After a couple of hours my fingers were sore from the stiff keyboard and my back hurt from the posture. That’s when I found I couldn’t shut the thing off because this thing had no non-volatile memory! So I had to keep going.
After a few more hours of typing and way too much time debugging I finally had the program working. It was fun for all of 42 seconds. Then I either had to leave it on forever or lose all my work. So I lost all my work.
I complained to my Dad and he bought me the TI tape drive which was nothing more than a consumer level cassette tape recorder the thing could save data on. There was a very primitive floppy drive available but it was several hundreds of dollars.
I found unless the tape was pristine it would lose data and the saved program would be useless. And of course one had to know exactly where the blank areas of tape were otherwise and where to start playback to retrieve the program. And to guard those data mix tapes from family members looking to make regular mix tapes.
That cassette data drive was a complete PITA. Kids you don’t know how good you have it!
I got halfway through the article before I realized it wasn’t a Kangaroo. And why not a Kangaroo would be a better name the a Kangoo. That’s sounds like a item on an Indian Restaurant menu. Now sure I bet kangaroo is on most Australian restaurant menus but a Kangoo is nothing but the name of a car.
I love it when my brain skips ahead. I spent a few seconds wondering what sex sandals are. I won’t do an internet search.
Cosby also advertised for Ford. On a happy note, James Garner advertised for Mazda.
Also Jell-O Pudding pops, but funny never any sweater company
Sex sandals are called thongs…
FWIW, when I was a child in Indiana we called flip-flops thongs. Times change.
Same here in ’80s Pittsburgh.
That’s the joke.
“A much better plan is to use tiny people and animals made out of clay or plasticine or something similar. Spokespeople made of such materials are far less likely to commit sexcrimes or say something racist to a waiter or anything like that.”
AFAIK Aardman Studio seems to have a pretty good record with regard to the people working there. Yeah, their entire oeuvre is indeed excellent.
Laika Studios has produced some excellent films though they do have some…issues. Neil Gaiman, the auteur of their first film, Coraline, has turned out to be deeply problematic, to say the least. One of the studio’s later films, The Boxtrolls, is unfortunately quite transphobic, ugh. And the studio has a pretty checkered record in its treatment of creatives and in its ownership by the Knights (yeah, the Nike co-founder and his son.)
2-D animation isn’t without its pitfalls; pretty much everyone knows about Walt Disney, lol. Some people do know about John Lasseter, formerly of Pixar. Considerably (!!) worse is John Kricfalusi, of Ren and Stimpy fame, of which not too many people seem to know about…
But, yeah, on the whole, generally a good idea to go with plasticine, cel, or digital when looking for spokespeople, lol. One can only hope Shaun the Sheep doesn’t turn out to be a milkshake duck…
All this – I loved early Ren and Stimpy, but – yeah… Coraline was great, as were the earlier Tim Burton collaborations. It seems creatives have problematic lives.
But does anyone really know who these people are? It’s the under 1% of the population who does this 6 degrees of indignation but no one else really cares
That’s the passenger version of the Kagoo (the civilized one) , there’s also a full fledged van version where all the windows behind the driver and front passenger seats are metal panels (except the ones at the back… but you won’t see much through them as there’s a massive grid between the driver/front passenger area and the back making it impossible for anythinng larger than a pen to go from the front to the back orfrom the back to the front)
Or from the back to through the back of your head.
Jason, are you forgetting that Wallace despoiled the moon with an oil leak from his rocket ship, was an accessory to a jewel theft, broke Gromit out of prison, and dated a serial killer (before feeding her to a crocodile? Maybe not sex scandal material but hardly the behavior you would hope for from a Renault salesman.
That’s more Renault CEO behavior.
Exactly!
I think Bill Murray in Kingpin… “I’m now a millionaire, I’m above the law.”
I can’t remember the source but the line I am exactly rich enough to get away with killing one person. Popped into my mind
But I wouldn’t put escaping another country in a piano box as beyond Wallace – at least without Gromits help.
Never heard of Wallace and Gromit before maybe I’ll watch a few episodes tonight?
You are forgetting the great cheese smuggling scandal they were in. In France that’s a much bigger outrage than a sex scandal.
Not having an affair would be a proper French sex scandal.
French cheese smells like farts.
Doesn’t yer standard US cheese taste, and have the texture of, low grade orange rubber. Absolutely no disrespect to real cheesemakers (sorry, fromagieres) of US who’s product smells of farts – some are supposed to be pungent like the Epoisses I just bought (eek) or mild (think Brie.)
To steal from myself from That Old Site: (TM)
“Subway Jared isn’t even the worst Jared”
…tiny people and animals made out of clay or plasticine or Composition-4
But not C-4
Oh the times, when people bought light sensible practical cars like the (OG) Kangoo!
And with that classic French ground clearance, it’s much more SUV/crossover’y than most heavy things with small windows (but lots of screens and beeps) you can buy today.
One of the few cars in the World, that actually looks good in yellow!
the mention of the TI-99 computer brought back memories of playing Hunt the Wumpus. Anyone else remember that game?
That was my family’s favorite game on our TI-99/4A when we had ours (which we got when I was something around 5 or 6)!
The only one I can remember is some sort of D&D like adventure game. Also, my brother wrote a Yahtzee game.
That’s what I wrote when I had off-class access to dad’s teletype access to Basic programming while he was teaching at Sacramento City College.
I do.
And at the same time Torch didn’t go into why TI doesn’t bother with the relentlessly competitive personal computer market anymore. That’s a remarkable act of self-discipline on the part of someone who’s the parent of a current high school student.
768: 1996 – explain xkcd
I was more a Zork player instead.
After my time
Several big car makers could do a lot worse than installing Gromit as their CEO. He has a well-documented history of fixing the mistake of others.
He really is the Brain to Wallace’s Inspector Gadget, isn’t he?
Ironically some of Renaults most famous adverts were playing with being a sex scandal themselves.
*Reads the Headline*
*Skips the article*
Oh no, YOU TOO WALLACE! Is there no one left to look up to?
*Sobs*
Wensleydale ain’t cheap. Gotta’ pay the cheese monger.
I found about Aardwark studios very late in life thanks to my son, who loooves Shaun the sheep. At first I was just grateful that there are no annoying songs or voices in it, but after a few days I started to enjoy the videos, and started to be really impressed by the quality and craft. I’m biased towards good stop motion, but what they do without any dialogue is amazing. They’re way more expressive than many MANY real life actors. Wallace and gromit is on my list next, and I mean MY list – they’re so good that I’ll use my “me” screen time to watch it!
Honestly, there’s some pretty good gags in Shaun the Sheep.
I had to stay home with him last Feb/Apr for reasons I prefer not to go into too much details, and Shaun the Sheep was one of the things that helped us go though 🙂
The episode where the sheep find the farmer’s record player in the junkpile and start their own nightclub is absolute brilliance! For a show purportedly for kids, the clubbing stereotypes the animals portray are spot on.
Chicken Run is fuckin brilliant too.
Also theirs? Added to my list!
Their Pirates! movie is an unrecognized gem of comedy.
Also Hugh Grant’s best role bar none.
Many decades ago, I found a Aardman Animation compilation on VHS that included a short called “Next,” that condenses Shakespeare’s plays into a one-man act. It’s brilliant. https://youtu.be/Z1z0MlNOtFQ?si=6qu6p6qQR6DZv_sg
They are such a gem. I actually love the speaking ones too. Very few characters have the classic London accents and the way the character’ mouths are animated are a perfect match for the unique accents that the voice actors have.
For example, watch Chicken Run. Many of the Chickens have very strong rural Yorkshire accents. The animation of their faces and beaks match the accent perfectly.
I was watching a British show called QI and had it on mute when the show started and watched Masie Adam speak before I unmuted. I KNEW she would sound like she was in Chicken Run with her on mute. How Aardman animated to make it obvious that a character had that accent with a lump of clay with a beak is shocking.
Example of Masie just chatting with someone.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0DyOazItuuo?feature=share
And in the 50s show Mr Ed they just put peanut butter on the horses gums
If you want to see what they can do with dialogue, check out Creature Comforts, interviews with ordinary people animated as various animals.
There are loads of them on YouTube, including the original masterpiece that got the short animation Academy Award ahead of the first Wallace and Gromit movie, A Grand Day Out.
Health and Safety Warning: once you start, Creature Comforts is liable to lead you on a descent into a YouTube rabbit hole.
If it is in the same style of all the rest, I can borrow from his (my son’s) screen time for those days where I can’t get up from the ground and just offload one hour to the TV as a nanny 🙂
Wallace and Gromit might not have any sex scandals, but they sure do have (bleu de) Gex scandals.
Even artistic creations are not safe. Let’s not forget the furor over the actions of the creators of Dilbert, Harry Potter, and countless others. Heinlein is one of my favorite authors, but he is certainly – problematic. Maybe seperate the art from the artist.
Perhaps the only pure soul was the late Fred Rogers.
I mean, Heinlein is problematic in so many ways he’s actually even more fun to read now.
1000% agreement. Asimov was (usually) more strait laced.
I love Asimov, he is one of my favourite authors. I hope no skeleton falls off his closet. I mean, if there ARE skeletons I prefer to know, I just hope there aren’t any.
Asimov was first and foremost an academic. He was also somwhat reclusive and rarely left NYC. His experience as a persecuted Jew also informed his writing: he never had humans dominating alien species – in fact alien species are near abscent from his overall work. Conversely, his focus on robots/AI may have been informed by his faith.
When Asimov tried to do “sexy” it was like your dad giving you The Talk. He was not good with the whole interpersonal dynamics thing.
He was not in real life either… he found real love relatively late in life. Also recall, he was still a teen when his first robot stories were published.
What were they? My recollection was his first was I Robot he wrote in his 30s around 1950. Did they have robots prior to that?
I Robot was a collection of his short stories from the ’30s and early ’40s mostly. IIRC he was 18 when his first story Robbie was sold and published.
One of his hobbies was off color “poetry”. Skip “100 Lecherous Limericks” if you still want to be a fan.
One of the reasons for the ‘usually’ qualification.
I’m told Dolly Parton was a solid citizen.
Agreed.
Parts of her, anyway.
Heinlen had some of his… oddness leak into his work. I didn’t grow up with him, just read about him after reading his work, and yeah, I wasn’t surprised…
Dad had a stocked library of golden and silver age Sci-Fi. I grew up on Asimov, Heinlien, Doc Smith, Simak, Niven, etc….
First week of seventh grade (1988?) I went to check out First Foundation from the school library. The librarian said it was too mature and refused to give it to me. That night I told dad, he calmly went downstairs and handed me his copy. Then wrote a letter the Superintedent of Schools, Principal and Librarian stating in no uncertain terms that EVERY book in the library was to be made available to young me, no questions asked.
Foundation is my “happy place” in sci-fi. I started with “prelude”, so I felt lucky to “know” Trantor before the decline.
Been decades since I read them. I have re-read most of the robot series more recently. I had read the orginals long before Prelude came out.
I also started reading him way later in my life. I read all his books as Epub in a Nokia X3!
Dad handed me a copy of I Robot at about 10 yrs old or so. I had read all the robot stories and the Elijah Bailey novels well before Foundation. I read Stranger In A Strange Land before I could drive.
I was always young, I graduated high school and entered college at 17. I have an engineering degree from a well regarded school; but people baffle me. I suspect I’m on the ‘spectrum’, which was not a thing in my mostly ’80s childhood. Mom asked me 20 years ago or so if I had ever heard of Asparger’s, I replied yes and that it finally explained a lot of my youth. My nephew is so diagnosed, my younger brother says he is just like me…
And yet there are 30 year olds who Cat in the Hat are too challenging for them
My 21 yo daughter is an avid reader. If nothing else, Harry Potter introduced actual reading to younger generations.
And 80-year olds, too.
Age old debate . . Can you separate the art from the artist?
Arguablely you cannot – both are intertwined. There is also art that I respect whose makers I cannot. Both can exist in the same frame. Welcome to Artopian.
I would add also that it’s hard to separate the art from the time in many cases. And sometimes you shouldn’t.
There’s a great documentarian named Waldemar Januszczak. He’s an overweight Brit that does exceptional documentaries about art history. (Yes, Waldy has a Polish name, but he’s 100% a self described “bloke”.)
One of the things that make them very interesting is that has a “bloke” he loves the naughty things about art. These tidbits of scandal make the art much more interesting. The same piece of art years and years and years later is just so normal looking that you don’t know how radical it was back in its day and you lose the impact.
One reason I always check Copywrite date, particularly for Sci-Fi. Much is firmly rooted in its’ own time.
Not all of it. I love humorous books. Two classics from the era are the Stainless Steel Rat (1957 by Harry Harrison) and the Retief Short stories (started in 1960 by Keith Laumer).
To start with Retief. Each short story starts the same. A giant meeting lead by an ambassador with lots of apple polishers trying to suck up and tell him he’s great. It’s funny and silly and full of weirdness and goofiness. But it’s 100% of era, especially since the main character (Retief) sits in a corner and puffs on a giant space stogie in an intentional act to make the meeting shorter because of the stink. If that isn’t enough of era, the first (and only) female character that shows up is always a secretary where the only thing developed about her is her breasts. She exists to be rescued and to give a reward to Retief for being rescued as the story ends. There’s potential for a modern story there, but it would take a massive rewrite and a LOT of character changes to do so. Sort of like what has happened to James Bond since that time.
Now to move to The Stainless Steel Rat. The main character is a man, but the secondary lead character is a woman. She never needs rescue. He does, normally because she has outsmarted him again. She’s a very modern woman even by 2026 standards. There’s no reason to need to rewrite or change her or the main character to do a show in 2026.
I think with Laumer, he was writing a parody of the stories of the era, it’s so far off the deep end with how he portrays female characters in Retief. But since books aren’t dominated by those portrayals of woman, today, it’s hard to tell and just makes the stories unreadable, which is a shame because they are exceptionally funny. While Harrison’s much more developed and modern take on a female character holds up well.
Very familiar with Slippery Jim.
Not really about early 2010s.
Was going to say that Office Depot’s use of Dilbert in ads hasn’t exactly aged well. Fortunately for them, those ads ended well before Scott Adams showed the world he is a racist shit.
And yet he isn’t
Unfortunately, rule 34 of the internet says p*rnographic material of Wallace and Gromit exists*. And since the defendant mr. Gromit is not a human, these acts are illegal.
*I did not do an internet search to backup this claim.
Please o please don’t send the results of an internet search to backup this claim.
Let me Google that for you…
And that a stretch limo Renault Kangoo exists.
Like this open-top one: Renault-Kangoo-Express-Limo-Argentina-2a.jpg (2500×1407)
Good news is that Wallace is not DQ’ed from becoming an ICE agent. Nor Gromit for that matter.
FBI is open too…
Cheese and crackers!
RIP Peter Sallis.
I’m now humming the Wallace And Gromit theme music and have a strange urge for some cheese. Wensleydale?
Stilton? I don’t know, lad. It’s like no cheese I’ve ever tasted.