I didn’t see this one coming. The Oscar for best animated short goes to the culture jam LOGORAMA whose clip featured a villainous Ronald McDonald tearing through a logoed metropolis on a grease-cycle. The French producer gave his thanks and assured all the unwitting sponsors that no corporate logos were harmed in the making of Logorama. Who is he kidding? He did what Adbusters still cannot, lambaste McDonalds on prime time television.
They don’t use the golden-arched design of UK fame, but instead seat the cop-killing Ronald on one of two motorcycles fashioned from the logos of the musical Grease, in particular the movie versions, (One) and Two. Ronald is chased by suitably Orwellian blimp-necks, policemen in the incarnation of Michelin Men.
Now, THAT’S truth in advertising.
I notice a war propaganda film “Hurt Locker” took best-whatever Oscar. And some bubble-head news commentator was saying “dedicated to the Troops”.
Translation, Dedicated to the War. If they truly want the Troops to come home soon then they need to stop dicking around fighting against health care and start demanding an end to the occupation(s).
Halliburton just got another 2.something billion$ no-bid contract for the pentagoons. Business as usual.
So, we get a corporate snub, (damn good one too) and then we get propaganda.
Awesome film!
can somebody tell me what this short film means?
and why it took 6whole years?
Here in the States we’re subjected to so much advertising it’s even done when one travels down any street. Just passing by the signs the corporations put on their storefronts. If we read a magazine (not many do anymore) or watch Television we have to see these same images, even in the movie theaters if we watch a movie, the corporations advertise in the stories themselves. It is an old practice but now it has no respite. We have the dedicated “commercial ads” in periodic breaks during the story on Television, but then we have actors in those shows portrayed eating a McDonalds hamburger and drinking a Coca-Cola. The music they put to these commercials, they play it on the radio so even if you don’t see the logos, you hear their “jingle” and think of the logo and the company they represent.
They place their logos all over the packages in which their products are sold, everybody knows what a coke bottle looks like, or their can, when people throw their garbage on the roadways it’s like hundreds of thousands of tiny signs lining the highways reinforcing the “drink Coca-Cola” label on the cans and bottles.
Same with all of them really. And it’s done for nothing more or less than pure shameless greed.
So with the film Logorama, the producer made a short story using nothing but advertising logos and icons. It is a rebellion, a scream against the massive amounts of time and money spent to imprint these names and pictures in our heads, so that when we go to buy food for our families we reach first for the brand names we have seen the most often. If an Army did that to prisoners of war, or something really similar, it would be called Brainwashing and would be a war crime.
Yet they can brainwash civilians, at their leisure, use “persuasion by suggestion” so often and so constantly that it’s almost like forcing us to think their way.
Something that would be a crime if a government would ever be prosecuted for doing it (all governments do, very few are ever prosecuted, especially not the United States) to prisoners of war, but private corporations are allowed to do it to civilians of their own countries and, if anything, rewarded for doing it.
There is very little pretense of “consent” involved, how would one drive a car or ride a motorcycle or a bicycle or even walk without having to see? and be bombarded without any amount of permission on your part with images and words designed to “persuade” you to buy things, most of which you have no use for.
We’re not willing subjects of these advertising attacks, no permission was ever asked, and according to the “laws” of our country none is necessary.