Saturday, April 6, 2013

Priceline.com Martial Arts Training Ad

William Shatner drops his daughter off at a temple, or whatever it is, for some kind of martial arts training in this commercial for Priceline.com. Oh, now I finally understand how they get such great deals on hotel rooms and airlines and such: they train their people in martial arts, and then send them around the world threatening hotels and airlines into giving them special deals or else! Ah, finally it’s clear to me! So then this is the most honest ad they’ve ever made.

Hey, maybe the next ad campaign for Priceline could have this blonde daughter of William Shatner’s character go, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit, to get revenge on all the businesses that wouldn’t give great deals to them, and call it: “Kill Hotel Bill” (Because they’re trying to kill the high price of hotel bills), or “Kill Airfare Bill”, etc. (Although I’m not sure how the Department of Homeland Security or the TSA would feel about a martial arts attack scene being filmed in their airport, so maybe just do the hotels one, or shoot the airfare one at the airline’s corporate headquarters?)

But this ad also clears up another issue I’ve never quite understood: that of the mouth movements in martial arts movies never matching the spoken dialogue. It’s because these movies are all documentaries about the brutal Priceline agents threatening everyone about room rates and such, and then they all fight, with Priceline winning the day, netting us all great deals! And then they redub the movie with some phony plot and act like that’s what it was always about, when all along it was Priceline brutalizing businesses and government officials to get special deals for its customers! (But we’re not fooled.)

Oh, but the Chinese Communist Party learned of this, and that’s why all the other Chinese movies have dialogue that doesn’t match the mouth movements either: whenever the government wants to insert propaganda the movies won’t agree to, they just dub it in afterwards! And with everyone already used to the mouth movements not matching the dialogue anyway thanks to all the Shaw Brothers Priceline deal documentaries sold as Kung Fu movies, all the Chinese government had to do was dub in their own stuff and no-one would notice! It’s true! (Okay, maybe it’s not true. But for all I know it could be…)

But this ad does one thing very well: it accurately demonstrates the generation gap with regard to technology: Shatner’s daughter knows all about smartphone apps, and Shatner doesn’t. (<In the ad he doesn’t. But you know, William Shatner inspired all this technology through his Star Trek and TekWar stuff, so naturally he knows it all. He just pretends not to know for this ad. But we all see through his ruse…)

Here’s the deadly deal-making documentary: