Tuesday, February 7, 2012

MetLife Cartoon Character-O-Rama Super Bowl Ad

This is the commercial where we see the Peanuts characters walking through a field, and then all these Hanna-Barbera characters show up, too, with other cartoon characters as well.

I loved this spot, but it didn’t make me think about insurance. What I was thinking was about how much it must have cost to license all of those characters for advertising purposes. Oh, but maybe they’re all owned by some umbrella corporation (like from Resident Evil), so you could get them all for some package deal. (But then they didn’t say you had to be insured against the zombie apocalypse.) Sorry about the Umbrella Corporation joke. I think they must all be owned by Warner Bros.

But seriously, there’s probably some legal deal where you can get all the characters for like 50% more than just a couple, or something, just to encourage this sort of thing. But anyone from the entertainment industry had to have this idea of the licensing cost flash across their mind when they saw this ad. And I didn’t think of much else until I saw Daphne from Scooby Doo get out of a limousine with Richie Rich, and then I said: “Oh, so even cartoon character women only care about money, huh? Why else would a beautiful and famous adult-ish teenager date a little kid?”

But this ad concept is the kind of thing that probably gets thought up and rejected time and time again due to cost, and now someone finally decided to do it! I’m glad somebody finally got it through the money guys, because it was fun, cute, smart, and charming. It doesn’t make me want to buy insurance, but I love the nostalgia for all my favorite cartoon characters. (Okay, for most of my favorite cartoon characters. I guess even WB can't own them all!) And again: I love this ad!

Here’s the charming cartoon character collection commercial: