I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
— Franklin P. Adams
I've always found new words this way, browsing the dictionary, looking up something else. Now, with the WWW I find all sorts of wonderful gems on the way to looking up something else.
Recently, while searching for ways to syntax-color code and turn it into web pages, I found a link to Ned Batchelder's blog and there, I also found this:
I saw a new TV commercial for Mountain Dew a few weeks ago, and was flabbergasted: it was the old Mad magazine "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon, translated into 3D. Bob Congdon found online copies of the ads. I think they've done a stellar job of capturing the feel of the cartoon, both in terms of the elemental plotting and violence, and the stripped-down black and white look of the strip. One of the ads ends "to be continued". I hope there will be more…
Thanks, Ned!
Unlike Barbara Lippert, who critiqued the Mountain Dew ads in Adweek, I loved Spy vs. Spy when I was a kid; I read them whenever I got my hands on a Mad magazine! We recently purchased the full set of Spy vs. Spy cartoons in book form; I still love those little black and white guys.
Barbara Lippert may have skipped over the 2-D panels in her teenage years but she has very good things to say about their 3-D Mountain-Dew loving versions:
…the spots are so inventive that they will get attention regardless, and kids who've never seen Spy vs. Spy (like my 14-year-old) will still think the ads look cool, in a virtuoso, post-Beetlejuice way.
…
The extreme care that went into crafting every inch of this is obvious. BBDO has created a fresh, hermetically sealed world that is perfect in every detail, from the re-creation of the hondo-mondo, '50s-futuristic conveyances (a helicopter, a car) and oversized comic devices (various springs and trap doors) to the size and movements of the silent, glinty-eyed, beaky cold warriors to the avant-garde-ish sound.…
Except now these guys have a reason to fight: over the soda can. The landscape is parched, white and vaguely urban when the first spot opens with White Spy dragging the only piece of color into the frame, a rounded, jukebox-like red and green Mountain Dew vending machine. (The cans are red and green, too.)…
The subsequent melees are as stylized as kabuki theater. There are giant mallets over transoms, trap floors, people falling through awnings—the result is a cross between Rube Goldberg and Alvin Ailey. (The people in the creepy spy suits are four-foot-something women—they moved better than men—one of whom is a dancer and one a veteran of Cirque de Soleil.) Like mobile cartoon strips, each spot is self-contained but ends with, "To be continued …"…
Inspector Gadget can't even dream of kissing the hem of the needle noses' Rudi Gernreich-like spywear.
For me, these are old friends come to new suspicious, conniving, squished, pounded, and trampled, life. I look forward to more!
