Ah, yes: the PBS Goldfish ad! It must be a few years old, as the YouTube videos were uploaded on 2006 and 2007, but I just saw it for the first time last week when I watched Masterpiece Mystery. So sorry if I’m late to the game here.
Okay, first of all, this looks to have been inspired by the best sequence from Finding Nemo: the one with the Mission: Impossible music, where they devise the escape plan, and we get to see it played out as if it were happening. For me, the rest of the movie was lame compared to that sequence. And that just goes to show you: don’t do something you can’t top too early! But maybe that advice is why so much stuff is lame and boring, so forget I said anything.
But here’s the main point I’d like to make here: Due to the sanitized-nature of the programming on PBS, this goldfish gets the idea that the world outside is all safe and awesome. But my recollection of film of salmon swimming upstream over little waterfalls is that they get grabbed and eaten by bears (!). So for me, the perfect ending for this ad would have been for the goldfish to make it all that way to the river, and to jump up that waterfall, just to get grabbed and eaten by a bear. Ha! There’s reality for you: The ugly truth!
Oh, but if they had had a bear grab it, look at it, and then throw it back for being too small, that would have been realistic enough for me, and I would have cheered it! But I’ve never seen that salmon-jumping-up-the-little-waterfall film before without also seeing the bears grabbing and eating them; have you? And if the goldfish had been thrown back, then that would be revenge against all the mean old salmon that bullied him all along the way up to that point, and it would be a heart-warming coming-of-age tale! But as it is, it’s just an unrealistic claptrap of a hippie fantasy. Something would have eaten that guy, and we all know it!
Here’s the ad I’m talking about:
