In watching the Peanuts TV specials as children, my sister
and I couldn’t help but notice and make fun of the ways some of the characters
danced, especially this one boy who dances by slouching and bobbing his head up
and down, and twin girls who dance by hopping back and forth on one foot and
then the other with their arms outstretched in a sort of jumping jack position.
The boy always seemed like he was depressed, and the girls always seemed manic.
So I thought these disparate dancing styles might make for a fun ad for an
antidepressant.
So in the ad, we’d see the depressed-looking boy’s dancing
as the “before”, and the girls’ manic dancing (although we’d only see one
person dancing, rather than two twins) would be the “after”.
We would see the boy dancing his head-bobbing dance, and the
announcer would say: “When you have the weight of the world on your shoulders
from depression, you dance like this.” Then we cut to see the jumping girl
dancing her happy dance, and the announcer says: “When you take (brand of
antidepressant), the weight of the world lifts off of your shoulders, and you
dance a happy dance like this, like you always should have.”
Here’s the Peanuts dancing scene I’m referring to, from A Charlie Brown Christmas (It starts at
around 0.07 seconds in. The boy is in the orange shirt in the front on the
right, and the girls are in purple dresses on either side of the boy. Then, at
0.17 seconds, we see the boy on the left and the girl on the right, both
dancing the dance I’m referring to, respectively.):
