The Family-Friendly DVD Player
I don’t know if it’s lack of inspiration, or just sheer desperation due to the time crunch involved, but this month became The Month Of Revisiting Old Ideas. This promo, another Hearst pre-packaged piece about a DVD player that skips over scenes of sex and violence, gave me a chance to revisit the “moving film” gag I used about a year or so ago on a story about Hollywood studios using northwest Arkansas as a location. This time, however, I played up some other elements too, right down the the green-backgrounded “The following preview…” screen and some on-screen text meant to evoke the hyperbolic movie trailers of the 1950s. (The screen shot above that shows “Shocking” is a relic of the first “draft” of this promo.) The end of the promo spoofs everything from the MPAA rating system to that ultra-thin, how-in-the-world-could-anyone-be-expected-to-read-that font that that credits are always shown in.
