Low Budget Ads Serve Only To Scare The Children

I'm a video producer for a living (no, I won't shoot your aunt's wedding...), and have made a couple of TV commercials in my career. A lot of my job involves discouraging clients from creating commercials just like this pair. The first will scare children since they detest shopping for clothes, no matter how you dress it up (I hated going to Lil' Deb n' Heir in my neighborhood). By the way, who's the Little Lord Fauntleroy in this ad who appears to have his own charge account? His clipped walk can only belong to a child who was mercilessly beaten thanks to his prissy clothes.

The other ad is frightening because of the costumed rabbit selling shoes. An eyeless costumed rabbit who sounds sort of like Elmer Fudd. Wrong!  The first lesson of including pop culture references in a commercial - don't cross the streams, boys... My adult friends often speak of their lifelong fear of anthropomorphic animal characters, and I've always thought that those were mostly false memories. If my local shoe store had this guy... this eyeless guy hanging around when I was a kid, I'd have bounded out into the nearest traffic intersection.

I haven't learned my lesson though. A few years ago I was acting in a children's film that starred a troupe of costumed animal characters. There was no budget to speak of, so the animal costumes were a bit ad-libbed. In the throes of the film I thought that they looked great, but looking back I now know that I was part of a cast that was basically nightmare fuel for kids. One day I'll be brave enough to share pictures from the video, until then take it from me - leave costumed animal acting to the professionals.

related:

Banana Splits are back
This character should have scared me, at least a little