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:
Netto Marken-Discount stores

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
If cats, of all creatures, are ready to get off their lazy bums and do some errands, then this store must be something special.

What they’re going for here is pretty simple: it’s cats in a supermarket built for cats, letting you do lots of “cats doing people things” and “cats doing cat things” material, both of which are reliably amusing and adorable. Not much else to it.

Except … look, maybe it’s just me, but this commercial can come off subtly unnerving. Not enough to make it a bad commercial, just enough to make it feel … off.

I think it’s that, while the commercial was obviously made using regular-sized cats and scale models of supermarket aisles, the impression it gives off (at least to me) isn’t that this is some special, tiny store just for cats. No, it’s that cats have somehow grown to human size (or since they didn’t get the scale quite right, a bit larger than human-size) and have taken over society (or at least our German supermarkets).

And, while I overall agree with the idea that cats are adorable, there’s something about a giant sized cat that awakens a primal fear, leftover from our ancestors who hid cowering from the roar of the sabretooth tiger … or just from imagining what it’d be like to be the mouse or small bird that our adorable housecats get between their paws.

Kinda reminds me of that meme of photoshopping scenes from Jurassic Park so the dinosaurs are replaced by dinosaur-sized cats, and it’s, if anything, more terrifying than the original.