Today is Black Friday. Millions of Americans are trampling and macing the shit out of each other so they can save 20 bucks on an Xbox or whatever. I’ve never participated in Black Friday shopping and today is no different. Instead, I’m holed up in a hotel room waiting to make jokes for people at Courtney’s Comedy Club in Moorhead, MN.
So how am I passing the time? By playing a video game made by a deodorant company starring a retired NBA player, duh.
Perfectly reasonable.
That right there is Old Spice Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World. Old Spice’s latest and (only slightly) most confusing ad campaign to date. Now, Old Spice is no stranger to nonsensical and baffling ads. The oldest I could find online was this little ditty starring Bruce Campbell –
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af1OxkFOK18&w=420&h=315]
I guess sales must have went up after Bruce Campbell just said a string of nonsense to a camera so Old Spice decided to crank up the crazy and now in 2012 their ads look like this –
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-m6Ua9Iqkg&w=560&h=315]
At least you know he’s trying to sell you deodorant, I guess.
The video game starts with retired NBA start Dikembe Mutombo rising up from the bottom of the screen holding a couple of doves. Click “start” and his head turns into a rocketship and blasts off from his shoulders –
Because Old Spice makes you smell good I guess?
The head lands on an island in space, opens up and Dikembe walks out of his own head with three cheerleaders. There’s a series of islands in front of him, each representing a game. There’s only one available now. Click on it and it will take you to a scene where a talking bear in a Cosby sweater explains to Dikembe that people in Ohio aren’t voting because they’re too busy dancing to Gangnam Style –
Dikembe is holding a duck during the entire scene. We are given no explanation as to why.
So, naturally, Dikembe straps on a giant bottle of Old Spice onto his back because it’s also a jetpack and proceeds to fly down a cave and throw ballots at people while they dance to Gangnam Style so they’ll vote or something. When 50 voters are hit, Dikembe reaches the bottom of the cave where the state of Ohio explains that it won’t vote because it likes dancing too much –
Ohio resists and a fight is ensued. In this boss battle, Ohio shoots a bunch of disco balls out of it’s mouth at the jetpack wearing, ballot throwing Dikembe. Once Ohio is defeated, he goes and votes. Then, the state of Florida comes into the screen, holds up a bowl of nachos and says “my votes will take weeks to get counted. Want to count these nachos in the meantime?” Florida then counts nachos poorly –
but what do nachos even have to do with… what?
The camera pulls out to show the bear watching this all unfold from a monitor. He turns to the camera and explains that you can have your high score submitted to somehow power a laser that’s carving out an extension to they Mayan calendar so the world doesn’t end next month. Seriously. They have a livestream of the laser at work –
This is where that whole “4 1/2 weeks to save the world” thing comes in I guess.
What the hell does any of this even mean? Is David Lynch writing ad copy for Old Spice now? This doesn’t make me want to buy any deodorant. It does make me want to play the other games as they’re released but I’m not going to buy any Old Spice.
Their stuff makes me break out anyway. I’m a Mitchum Man.