The Commercial Spinoff Showcase

Have you noticed that sometimes a decent commercial suddenly becomes a long series of lame commercials? Let's look at a few of the ones that have really stood out:

Geico's Gecko--The lovable little critter appeared to start as a catchy ad gimmick before going on to become the symbol of the company. Now, he's doing lame interviews with an accent (Australian? I'm lousy about accents).

Geico's Nerdy Office Worker--In one of the first gecko era commercials that didn't feature the gecko directly, they interviewed several people in an office about what they thought of their computer generated spokesmodel. One interviewee was a nerdy fellow who later appeared in several commercials including some where he went around the country interviewing customers, sometimes in a hot tub.

Geico's Cavemen--I've never really got these. They're sometimes kind of funny, but they've often strayed from their origins. Lately though they've gotten back to referring more to Geico in each one. (I think it's funny that Geico has three examples that I've been able to easily think of, and Wikipedia mentions some other ones that I didn't remember at first and I won't go into here).

Dodge Showroom (Marty)--There have been a series of radio commercials in our local market where one Dodge dealer calls up another one and mocks him. It started with the one dealer asking the other how the sale was going on and the other would have some lame attempt to copy the success of the caller (kind of like a not-so-good-natured version of the recent Macintosh commercials with the PC), but now this guy is just calling up the other dealer and verbally abusing him. It's not funny anymore (not that it ever was), and now it's just painful to listen to. Not as painful as the supermarket jingles, but painful all the same.

That's all I have for now. I guess that except for the Dodge one, none are really that awful, but come on. I think we've seen enough of these for now. Speaking of Dodge, maybe I'll get around to explaining why I hate them so much (in my defense, they hated me first).