Ultrabook Kung Fu Teahouse Ad

I just saw a new ad for a laptop called the Ultrabook that's lots and lots of fun! It has two Asian ladies in period-looking robes and such fighting each other in a teahouse in that gravity-defying kung fu style that's reminiscent of the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and as it turns out, they are fighting over the use of a power outlet for their large, cumbersome and totally outdated mega-laptops. Then some other lady with this Ultrabook laptop snakily rubs it in that she's got lots of battery power left, and so she doesn't even need a power outlet (not that she'd get to use it anyway, with these deadly ninja assassins fighting over it!). So, insulted by this, the former enemies team up to kill this smugly superior lady with their 20 fingers of death! Or at least, that's what I was hoping would happen. Instead, some bearded guy says the two fighting ladies "bring great shame upon this coffee hut"! (Yeah, women are always smashing up the place! It's a good thing there are usually men around to shame them for their ultra-violent activities! Otherwise, we'd be living in a deadly world locked in constant mortal combat! Seriously ladies: violence isn't always the answer, you know!)

I love this silly ad, except that I think the guy shaming the women at the end is unnecessary and uncalled-for. The women see the error of their ways and feel quite silly enough without the judgmental condemnation of Mr. Self Righteous, and it just puts an unfortunate aftertaste on this whole scenario, or at least as far as I'm concerned it does. (He's probably just jealous that he's not as good at kung fu as these women are! Besides, if it weren't for these ladies' awesome martial arts skills, we wouldn't even be interested in that "coffee hut" to begin with. Or could it be that this guy says they bring shame upon the coffee house because they stopped fighting before one of them was horribly killed? {That's how macho men do it! Letting your opponent live is disgraceful! I've seen Shaw Brothers' movies, so I know what I'm talking about!}) The spot was great up until that point, and it was really fun and everything, so why put an extra exclamation point on it? I mean, it's still great, but I think it would have been better without that chiding part.

But there is a real problem with this ad that I wish wasn't there, and I see this so often in ads to their detriment, and that's the fact that the women fighting over this wall outlet are given ridiculously large and clunky laptops to hold, and they don't even look like anything anyone could possibly be using nowadays. And rather than making it so people don't remember that there are lots and lots of efficient battery life laptops these days, or hoping that they won't remember that you can have two batteries with you, etc., these ridiculously clunky fake laptops simply make me think: "Hey: nobody uses laptops like that! There are tons of small, sleek, thin, newer models that... Oh, wait: They're using this ploy to try to make it so I don't remember that part! Lame." Oh well. Their point is very good anyway, and people forget to charge their batteries, etc., and some people prefer to use the wall outlet anyway (I do too, sometimes), so this ad would have worked just as well (actually, I think even better) had they used realistic-looking newer laptops for the fighting women to hold.

Anyway, these are minor quibbles, and I love the fun creativity and pop-culture sensibility that went into this spot. Well done, people! More, please!

Here's this really great ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1KBppDI9ok