Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Real Steel Motor Oil Tie-In Ad

That’s right: there is a motor oil that is using a tie-in ad campaign with the boxing robot movie Real Steel. (It's called Royal Purple Motor Oil.) Yes, I want the kind of oil for my car that CGI robots that punch each other in a movie use. There’s no more punishing task for motor oils than use in imaginary special effects robots! If it can function in fake environments like computer visual effects, then you know it will work great in your engine!

How silly can you get? Like using robots that beat each other up is a way to measure how much punishment a motor oil can take anyway! I’ll bet robots would be all batteries, servo motors and hydraulics: not where you’d be likely to need or use (or even find) motor oil. But whatever: a movie tie-in is a movie tie-in, right?

But wouldn’t it be more appropriate for an ad about power steering fluid? That’s probably a lot closer to what they’d use in those boxing robots anyway; um, if the robots were real, that is. But then again, I guess there aren’t many ads for stuff like power steering fluid anyway, huh?

In a related story, I guess the rights to “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots” are already taken, so they had to invent some also-ran version of boxing robots for the movie Real Steel? It just makes it seem like a movie about “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots” that forgot to get the rights first, and then couldn’t get them once the movie was finished, doesn’t it? But there’s no way not to think of “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots” when you see the ad for this movie, so it’s silly to bother making the movie at all if it’s not called: Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. I mean, right?