This Commercial For A Needle In Your Eye Has A Very Strangely CG’d Mustang

Modern medicine is a remarkable thing, as are modern computer graphics. But that doesn’t mean it’s always used for good. There’s an ad out now for a medication called Izervay (avacincaptad pegol), which is administered via a not horrific-at-all-sounding needle in the eye that targets geographic atrophy, which is when parts of the retinas waste away, leading to vision loss. It sounds terrible, and I’m glad there’s a medication like this to at least slow that process down.

But then why does this ad do such terrible things to a classic Mustang that it could make someone actually welcome a loss of vision? I have no idea, but I think we should look at what has become of this Mustang.

First, I guess you should see the commercial itself:

We see this silver-haired citrusy classic-car-enjoyer tooling around town in her lovingly-maintained 1965 Fnord Plustang or whatever we’re going to call whatever this is:

It’s like someone took a Mustang and pointed a powerful, military-grade anti-details ray at the car, eliminating all badging and the Mustang’s trademark fake side air scoops and the bit of rear bumper wraparound. She’s lucky to still have door handles on that thing.

Around front, things get even weirder:

What the hell is going on here? Look at that grille! You can kinda see where the original Mustang horse-badge was on the grille behind those angled chrome bars. The under-bumper turn indicators are gone, and the headlights now seem to be those strange, simultaneously round-and-square headlights like the ones used on a 1976 Peugeot 104, for example:

… or even some of the Mustang prototypes and styling exercises that played with non-US-spec headlamps:

Around back, we see similar edits made to the classic ’65 Mustang look:

The traditional Mustang three-bar taillights have been merged into these blocks with oddly opaque-looking reverse lamps, and the central fuel filler is gone, relocated to, perhaps, behind the license plate or maybe under the rear seat cushion. Who knows with these Fjord Mustards?

I have to give credit to the CGI team here, who managed to make these changes look pretty seamless in the ad itself. I don’t think it’s likely at all that an actual Mustang was disfigured, so this seems like a prime use for CG.

That said, I’m not really clear why this was done. I get that the company may not have wanted to have Ford logos or badging or whatever in their ad, but it’s not like specific cars haven’t been used in ads before. Look, here’s a Viagra ad that very prominently features an old Corvette, even clearly showing the badges, before that dude wipes his sudsy hands on his pants, pops a pill, and bones his partner there, aroused by his sensual Boomerly washing of that car:

It’s funny, the use of the sprinkler to rinse the suds off the car while he sweatily humps that probable mom is reminiscent of the manner of hijinks seen in a Mentos ad.

I don’t really understand the rules here; undisguised cars have been used in ads without express permission of the manufacturers for decades. Movie makers don’t need to get permission from Kia or GM or Honda or whoever whenever they show a scene of traffic, so why go through all the efforts the Izervay people went through to hide the branding of that Mustang?

And if they just wanted to keep out any Ford logos, how much cheaper would it have been to just find a de-badged Mustang? It’s not like Mustangs were covered with huge logos!

I don’t understand why it’s like this. I do kind of like seeing these weird mutated cars that show up as a result, though, so I really shouldn’t complain.