Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds writes: "This South African commercial from Allan Gray Investment, with creative by the King James agency, is really a showstopper. What if James Dean had lived?
What if James Dean had lived?
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He'd be pissed.
I think there's a taste issue with showing a man who did die, even showing his death, but showing him escaping it.
Sorry, but this is tasteless in the pursuit of commerce. If this was a PSA about driving safely? Sure.
But not about "long term investments". That's just tasteless.
This would be somewhat like showing slow-motion black and white shots of Robert Kennedy. Showing him wresting the gun from Sirhan Sirhan, and then using it to save Martin Luther King, then showing King and Kennedy as old men at Obama's inauguration, then move in close to show them toasting with Coca-Cola.
What if RFK and King had lived? They would cheer Obama on with the refreshing clear taste of Coke Zero!
And James Dean was gay so it's rather degrading to him to continue to leave him in the closet in a commercial.
The DVD for "Giant" has some great interviews with his co-stars who thought if he had lived, how wonderful it would have been if he and Rock Hudson had gotten together.
Or like a commercial showing the Beatles playing some sort of guitar hero game. Oh wait.
What if?
Jack Dann's THE REBEL comprehensively answers this question.
Pretty bad taste for what it is, but still very cool. I wouldn't be surprised if it were bought by MADD or something.
You know what? Good taste be damned.
I don't care what this is advertising, a company spent a boatload of money on making something completely awesome and succeeded, I applaud them for taking the risk.
Duh-yam, the dialogue is teh stink, though:
Dean died from choking?
"Or like a commercial showing the Beatles playing some sort of guitar hero game. Oh wait."
But of course Beatles Rock Band doesn't "imagine" Lennon or Harrison today. It shows them historically during their lives. So, not an apt analogy at all.
I'm not against resurrecting the dead to be pitchmen for a product per se, I just feel falsely manipulated by this ad, which I assumed had a deeper meaning worth justifying the emotional manipulation it offers.
So he would have become Paul Newman?
I think at some point I quit caring if things were tasteless. It allows me to enjoy a lot more commercials. =)
Pretty cool, I think.
What if Nikolai Tesla had lived? Because really, that would be so much more awesome than some random actor.
I'll say this, they did one Hell of a better job than Ford did with their Steve McQueen driving a Puma commercial. This is much better storytelling, much more technically convincing, and beautiful.
That's not even mentioning the terribleness of this year's Tag Heuer bit with Steve McQueen and Lewis Hamilton.
@13, He would have discovered eternal life, or the next best thing. Because otherwise he would have died.
"Well, everyone knows that James Dean died in 1955. What this commercial presupposes is... maybe he didn't."
- Eli Cash (if he was real and produced this commercial)
The communications network Alcatel tastelessly used Martin Luther King, Jr. in much the same way back in 2001. Here's a link to their commercial on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ5I_oM2HWY&feature=player_embedded
I don't understand... did the long term investment commercial just say life is short, you could die tomorrow?
Why is this tasteless? I think it's rather neat.
Tasteless would be Bob Saget fucking James Dean's corpse's eye socket. This is downright smarmy.
This ad should win an award. And it should go to the ad agency's account executive. For managing to convince a SOUTH AFRICAN INVESTMENT FIRM that they could best advertise their product by spending SEVEN FIGURES producing AN ALTERNATE HISTORY EPIC about a HOLLYWOOD FILM STAR HARDLY ANYONE UNDER 50 FUCKING REMEMBERS.
#13 What if Nikolai Tesla had lived? Because really, that would be so much more awesome than some random actor.
Um, Tesla _did_ live. He died at age 86. Just how much tragically wasted potential do you think we're talking about there?
Aw, AU, think about it: Nobody under 50 in America has any fucking money to invest.
#22, but what if he'd made it to 87? Maybe he was right on the verge of something even bigger!
An outstanding idea and well done.
I liked it plenty. Some of you people are misers who seemed to be more concerned with offending some standard of 'good taste' rather than your own sense of it. Maybe you just have a sensitive spot for Dean :|
I don't get it, why do people think this ad is good? I watched and just though "meh". Am I missing something?
Most likely, if Dean had lived long enough, we would have realized that this cultural icon really was more form than substance. We would have had a chance to hear him express himself on lots of issues and it would have given us a chance to hear him say stupid things.
Perhaps, we would have eventually seen him as perhaps John Voight's precursor (Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck), or John Wayne's, that bully pantywaist, friend - rather than the characters he played on the screen. Who knows.
But, as with Presley and Princess Diana, when he would have eventually died, the media machine would have refashioned him into an immortal whose contributions to humanity surpassed Da Vinci's, or Gödel's...
James Dean did live. He lived from 1931 to 1955.
Tesla lived also, and is still alive at age 153, after faking his death 66 years ago at the tragic age of 86. He's spry, but kooky.
"Most likely, if Dean had lived long enough, we would have realized that this cultural icon really was more form than substance."
It's sort of like if Britney Spears had died in some freak accident in the summer of 2001 and become this generation's Marilyn. That could have happened.
Or, to be a little less ridiculous, remember what Marlon Brando turned into later on - this weird, hulking, irrelevant recluse mumbling about cookies to Larry King.
If James Dean had lived he would have become our first openly gay president.
I pitched a similar one to Allan Gray...
"What if Paul Ruebens Didn't Get Caught Wanking?"
I think it was a close second.
This is a perfect explanation of why James Dean was what he was and why advertising people are what they are.
NYer cartoon best summed up advertising a few years ago.
Adman has tagline board at feet: "Buy it, asshole." But he's showing client another board: "We think you'll like it."
Client: "Let me see the other one again."
Thanks for mentioning THE REBEL, Sean. Indeed, I think I answered some of the questions here with the novel The Rebel: An Imagined Life of James Dean.
I like "good taste be damned." A fun alternate universe minute.
This video has become hard to locate online... after watching this week's 60 minutes, I wonder it the owners of the estate didn't authorize this commercial...
And doing a high school, freshman year book report on a historical figure, focusing on James Dean and the irony of his true (gay) life, proved to be an interesting decision on my behalf...