Pickup Truck X-Games
“No Peter, it’s perfectly normal to siphon jet fuel from an active runway with the intention of flying a pickup truck.” - Glen Quagmire
I watch a lot of football on weekends. Consequently, I watch a lot of pickup truck commercials and I’d like to briefly deliver some bad news to the advertising folks at Chevy, Ford, Nissan and Toyota. No only will I not be buying a pickup truck any time soon, but I’ve lost the ability to tell the truck ads apart. Specifically, I’m referring to the Ford, Toyota and, I think, Nissan commercials that have been unavoidable for the first couple of weeks of the season.
The Chevy ads with the Mellencamp song are repeated too often but at least the song, tiresome as it becomes, is distinct. Americana shots of wheat fields, children and big cities backup the patriotic lyrics and it’s endearing in the same way a six-year-old’s Fourth of July crayon masterpiece is endearing. The flag only has four stripes and about nine stars but it’s so hopelessly sincere that it can be charming - at least at first. (Here’s a horrifying thought: Chevy used Seger’s “Like a Rock” for about fifteen years, does that mean that we’ve got another decade and change of “Our Country” to look forward to?) The extreme truck ads, on the other hand, blur together.
Showing cars and trucks doing inane things is nothing new. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen small tree stumps ripped out of the ground with tow chains and snow banks exploded by truck grills.[1] Those were just precursors for what we have now though. In case you’ve missed them, these ads consist of demonstrations of over the top truck-ness such as braking a landing cargo plane on landing and hauling a shipping container up over the lip of a cliff. The ads are narrated by men with voices so deep and raspy that they sound like power tools and the appeal seems to be that if your truck can do these extraordinary feats then it must be able to do all the big, manly chores that you (yes you!) need a truck to do.
There are deeper issues to make fun of here, penile insecurity and general feelings of unmanliness for emasculated suburbanites to name but two. Those insecurities are at the immortal heart of advertising though and I wouldn’t want to quarrel with them. But there really is only one logical conclusion for these ads: trucks slamming head on into one another at sixty miles an hour. Whichever one suffers less damage wins. The only other thing I can think of that would compare is chaining two of them together and seeing which bumper, hitch or drawbar falls off first, but that lacks the exciting violence of a head on collision.
The Super Bowl is only four months away, fellas. Let’s see some flying glass and crumpled steel!
(As a brief aside I’d love to meet the guys who stage these ads. No matter how silly it is to make a truck to do something like haul concrete up and down a two hundred foot ramp for no reason, anyone who is both crazy enough to attempt this crap and smart enough to pull it off has to be fun.)
[1] Snow banks don’t actually explode when hit by a truck and tree stumps…well, there’s a reason they use dynamite to get rid of them. Either the chain will break (if you’re lucky) or the truck will (if you’re not).
