Quote:
Originally posted by LarryIII
I haven't seen the Ford vs. Suby commercial, but I saw a commercial last night and it made me very, very angry. It is for Pontiac. I think it's for the Grand Prix, but don't hold me to that. It shows a young guy and girl dressed in black leather outfits (ala Matrix) and dark sun glasses. The girl is driving. She is tossing the car around then puts it into a 360 degree drift. When it comes to a stop, she gets out and deploys a white cane with a red tip. This implies that she is legally blind.
I think that this is quite irresponsible of GM. I hope that they get letters from the blind organization protesting this commercial.
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Larry, I'm not sure if you are trying a new humor angle lately, or if you are serious, but the last few months I've noticed you've been offended by quite a few things both in posts here and stuff like this. Just an observation, everyone is entitled to their opinions and free to speak them, so that is cool. It was just that I've known you for a few years and hadn't really noticed this until recently.
Anyway, as for the blind organizations protesting, I'm not saying they won't, but I don't see why they would. First of all, the commercial is obviously not meant to be serious, it is trying for shock value and a little humor and probably most importantly they know people will talk about it as we are now. Back to blind people being offended, I can't see why they would be. As you mentioned, until the end of the commercial all we see is a very hip young couple skillfully pushing the car to the limit in several performance maneuvers. At the end when we see that she (and maybe both of them) is/are blind, the only thing we would take from it if we believed it to be real would be, whoah, blind people are cool. Yes, I'm sure no one really believes it is real, but even then I doubt anyone thinks real sight impaired people are being exploited by the commercial. I guess time will tell and maybe we will hear about some protests, but I would think most of the blind community will just chuckle when they hear about this commercial from their friends.
One could say that this commercial is irresponsible in that maybe a blind person could actually try to drive a new Grand Prix with disasterous results, but that would be beyond stupid of them to try. I'm sure there is a disclaimer in the fine print on the ad, similar to how paint thinner now has to have a disclaimer on it saying do not drink. And every other car commercial out there for anything remotely performance oriented has the same disclaimers for all the stunts they show the car doing. We had the conversation on here months ago about the WRX commercial showing the guys pushing the car through mountain roads at illegal speeds.