Thursday, July 31, 2008

You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

So, have you seen the new J.C. Penney commercials that rip off The Breakfast Club? Or, as Pajiba put it: "Do you know what it’s like to feel your heart atrophy in under 60 seconds?"

So many things about this commercial piss me off. Let's start with the fact that apparently 45 kids have Saturday detention. Although, the commercial is so lazy in ripping off TBC that they never actually say that the kids are there for Saturday detention. They could very well be in homeroom, unsupervised. Because the only adults shown are the parents dropping off the kids at the very beginning. But the Principal and Carl the Janitor are the best! They don't even warrant a cameo?

Back to the kids. While the actors in the commercial are racially more diverse than the original TBCers, they all look exactly alike. Obviously they're all dressed in JCP fashions, but they're all dressed as preppy as possible. The girl who I guess is supposed to be Ally Sheedy's character is dressed in a magenta polo-style dress. WTF? I'm sure JCP could have found something black in the Juniors dept to throw on that actress. The entire fucking point of the movie is that 5 kids from different social groups are thrown together for one Saturday and they bond and become friends until Monday morning when they go back to being strangers. Ok, that last part doesn't actually happen, but I'm guessing.

The point of the commercial? I'm not entirely sure but I think it's "You're all exactly the same already, you might as well wear cheap JCP clothes."

Also, I hate the cover version of TBC's theme song they use in the commercial. So happy and uuugghhhhhh. That just reminds me of how happy all these little fuckers are to be in Saturday detention. They're losing an entire Saturday! They should be pissed! Not all smiley!!!!!!

Raise your hand if you think JC Penney should have kept the scene where the kids all smoke pot. Thanks, Ab, for raising your hand. If they kept the pot scene it would at least give the kids a reason to be so happy to be in Saturday Detention.

I really can't go on anymore, or my head will explode. Thanks, JC Penney, for taking a cherished film and bastardizing it so that you can sell some shitty clothes to children who don't know any better. But you forgot one thing: These kids you're selling to? It's their parents who are buying. And their parents were teenagers themselves when The Breakfast Club came out. Way to fuck it up, JCP marketing.

JC Penney sees us as they want to see us: as mindless idiots who won't recognize that they're trying to capitalize on our fond memories and sentimentality by putting forth a lazy hack-job version of a generation's favorite movie. I rarely shopped JCP to begin with, but I'll avoid it like the plague now. To paraphrase John Bender: "Eat my shorts, JC Penney. Eat. My. Shorts."

1 comment:

Abby-Wan Kenobi said...

Maybe the person that made the comercial never watched TBC, they just saw a trailer or a montage. Maybe they didn't realize the kids traveled in different groups, they just thought they were all wearing trendy 80's fashions. Maybe they even missed the detention thing. Maybe they were on pot when they made the commercial. Or prozac.