TO THE BAD CAVE!

This year I didn't tape the Super Bowl in order to just get the commercials to watch the next morning once I got home from work. Now that I've got Artemus, a fantastic computer which I'm told gives me more capabality than most small businesses, I figured I'd just watch them online.

Maybe I needed that bumper of a football game instead of relentlessly wading through all of those blipverts! By the time I was done watching them twice - once to get the feel of it, the second time for frame grabs - I felt like that squirrel in the Bridgestone ad!

Slowly but surely I'll work my way through the Blipvert Jungle to analyze those with Toobworld potential and eventually I'll blither on about them here in my Inner Toob Sanctum Sanctorum.

First up:

The Geico Ad
Those original Geico commercials about the cavemen living in modern society were pretty funny. Just about every one of them had their moments - "It's my mother. I'll put her on speaker phone." "Tina's here. We're getting back together." Those two still crack me up!

But then the guy who created the concept thought it might be fun to expand the premise into a sitcom.

I saw only a couple of episodes and while they weren't chock-full of chuckles, they were at least well-written. The one with the cavewoman had some exchanges of dialogue that might have been at home in a Woody Allen or an Ed Burns movie - without the hairy knuckles.

But overall? Not one of ABC's shining moments last season.

Based on the tableaux in the opening credits, these cavemen had been around in pivotal moments of History, so that might have meant trying to find a splainin as to why we hadn't seen them over the years (in real time as well as in toob time) in shows like 'Rome', 'The Adventures of Sir Lancelot', 'Gunsmoke', 'Banyon', 'The Mod Squad' and 'Seinfeld'. (Well, maybe the case could be made for Kramer.....)

Whereas with the cavemen in the commercials, they seem to have only recently found themselves thrust back into the real world and are still struggling to adapt. The guy in the second commercial (third? fourth?) even said that he didn't know those guys were still around.

So along comes this Super Bowl ad to reclaim the heritage of the commercial cavemen. As it turns out, the ABC sitcom 'Cavemen' was a TV show and not part of Toobworld's inner reality. We see these two cavemen hanging out after having just watched what was probably the premiere episode.

One of them is disgusted outright by what he saw; his friend takes a more philosophical approach to what the concept could turn out to be.

So now we can go back to the time before the series and proclaim that any future cavemen from the Geico ads are in Toobworld. Those from the series 'Cavemen' are not.

BCnU!
Toby OB

PS:
I can't speak with certainty on this, but it could be that the Geico Cavemen have been around long enough in Toobworld to have sired children by Homo Sapien females.

If so, I think we saw one of those hybrid female offspring in the Planter's ad.....