Here's another one of those commercials where you can barely believe someone went to the time and expense…but they did. The product is for the Sony Bravia line and I would love to have been in the meeting where someone said, "Hey, I know how to sell our new television sets. Let's go to San Francisco and dump a quarter of a million Super Balls down a hill!" I'm not saying this was a bad idea. I'm just fascinated as to how you get to it. And I suppose I'm wondering how many times someone watches this spot on TV and says to his wife, "Hey, Marion…they dumped 250,000 Super Balls down a street in Frisco. I think I'll buy a Sony Bravia!"
(I've always loved those commercials where they show you vivid colors and beautiful pictures like you'll get if you buy one of their sets. They assume you'll forget that you're seeing those vivid colors and beautiful pictures on the set they want you to replace.)
There are a couple of different versions of this Bravia spot around. This one is two and a half minutes. If you'd like to view it larger on your monitor and with better resolution, go to this page. And if you're interested in what's involved in sending that many bouncey-balls down the boulevard, there's also a "Making of…" documentary that runs a little under seven minutes. At no point in it do they tell you how (or even if) they cleaned them all up.
One other thing before you watch it: It's a marvelous piece of filmmaking but does it really look to you like 250,000 balls? Doesn't look like anywhere near that number to me. They had to have had nets to catch the balls, right? I mean, you don't just leave rubber balls all over the city or let them bounce down into the business district…and there's a limit to how many the crew and the spectators could have carted off. If you catch them, you can use them over and over again, right? I don't see any shot that looks like it had more than a few thousand in it. Why would they have needed a quarter of a million of them? And what did they do with them afterward?
I spend way too much of my life thinking about things like this. Let's go to the commercial…
