You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
The Product:
The Game of Life from Milton Bradley
The Promotion:
The Pitch:
We’ll prepare your kids for the cruel, cutthroat world of adulthood.
Overall, this ad is charming, mildly amusing, and utterly benign … except for a couple moments that made me go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa – wait … what?” And, oddly, both involved the same child actor.
The first one comes early. At the beginning of the ad, they haven’t established the board game context, that these kids are just describing the roles they played in The Game of Life. In that no-context scenario, having a pre-teen girl cheerfully announce, “I had twins!” … well, it conjures up some disturbing implications that I doubt Milton Bradley intended.
I don’t think something like that would make it past test screenings today. But this was the 1970’s, when commercials were telling us nothing was sexier than a baby, so it probably didn’t even register.
The other spit-take-inducing moment is also a product of its time, but in a different sort of way. See, like most board games, The Game of Life has gone through many updates and alterations over the years. The original version dates back to the 1860, and had a board that looked like this:
Obviously, they’ve made a lot of changes between then and now. By the time I first played the game in the 1990’s, they’d removed the square marked “Revenge!” that let you take money from other players. Until watching this ad, I had no idea such a square had ever been part of the game.
As such, when the same little girl from before now declared, “I’ll get revenge!”, I was like, “Whoa, this is getting dark all of a sudden!”
Those are just my responses to this commercial. Any of you have the same reactions? Am I making something out of nothing? Are there other parts of the ad you had a strong reaction to instead?
Comment down below!