We watch... so you don't have to.
Kill Me! Kill Me!
April 23: Philip Michaels
April 24: Gregg Wrenn
April 25: Ben Boychuk
April 26: Greg Knauss
April 27: Jason Snell
May 1: A Loyal Reader
But there is good news to report. I have seen that particular piece of poison only once since the article ran, and not at all in the past two weeks. The spineless bastards at Isuzu have caved in after the barrels of e-mail you sent them, demanding reparations for psychological trauma the Amigo spot inflicted on innocent bystanders.
Give yourselves a pat on the back, you deserve it. Victory is ours!
But just because Isuzu has been properly chastised and sent running doesn't mean vigilant TeeVee viewers can let their guard down. Plenty of advertising obscenities continue to blight our screens. Strangely, most of them involve telephone companies. 10-321 ads with snake-oil salesman John Lithgow; 1-800-COLLECT promos featuring the buffoonish Ed O'Neill; and the preternaturally annoying AT&T spots hosted by former FCC commissioner and noted telecommunication authority Paul Reiser.
Yet none of these can compare to the lip-curling bitterness of the McDonald's ads featuring the most loathsome human being to ever shoot through an electron gun, Eddie the Echo.
The last I heard, this character was a Bay Area test-marketing experiment, which gives viewers in other parts of the country an even more compelling reason besides astronomical housing prices and 24-hour gridlock to avoid moving to Silicon Valley. However, a couple months back McDonald's announced that it was planning on inflicting Eddie on the rest of America.
Let me just apologize in advance for the San Francisco-San Jose metroplex. Whatever missing-link test audience McDonald's found to actually support Eddie the Echo in no way reflects on the generally cosmopolitan and somewhat sophisticated population found around here.
For those of you who haven't seen Eddie yet, you don't know how lucky you are. He is a pasty-faced string-bean with huge black-framed glasses who dresses in 70's fashions that so many of the misguided youth of today believe make them cool. In fact, it makes Eddie look like the kind of wanna-be computer nerd that other nerds beat up on.
His clever nickname is the result of his propensity to say things twice. "How ya' doin'? How ya' doin'?" is his catch phrase.
Rather than recognize this for the clear symptom of severe temporal lobe impairment that it is, Eddie's friends and colleagues just smile and wave.
The actor that portrays Eddie is certainly doing a bang-up job projecting the kind of personality that makes you just want to strangle him. I'll bet a sawbuck that his fellow actors walk around the set, kicking the crap out of him, just for being there.
And my hatred for Eddie in no way springs from one particular commercial which features Eddie on a date. The suave and sophisticated Edster takes his date miniature golfing where all sorts of wacky hijinks ensue. At the end, Eddie says goodbye to her and it turns out he was dating twins.
Eddie the Echo? Does everything twice? Get it? Oh my, so clever.
Anyway, both twins just happen to be more beautiful that any one of the girls I've ever gone out with. They play miniature golf with this dim-witted poster child for Star Trek conventions, he takes them to McDonald's to eat and yet, still, at the end of the date they give him a come-hither look that clearly shows he will be getting to know them in a Biblical sense very soon.
Not that I'm bitter or anything about it. After all, why should I get all worked up about a fictional character who looks like he's the sickly cousin of Screech from Saved by the Bell scoring with two beautiful women while I sit at home on Saturday night, watching Xena?
Eddie... you're a dead man.
