Max Blum, Toyota, and quiet acceptance

Jeffrey Songco's excellent piece about Toyota's "It's Reinvented" ad over at the Huffington Post really crystallized my thoughts about last night's Happy Endings. The ad, which features Toyota reinventing various mundane objects and making them better, has been praised as a step away from the heteronormative culture of advertising due to a moment early on concerning a "reinvented couch." The narrator describes the reinvented couch, which is made up of girls in bikinis, as a schlubby Everyman comes into his apartment, looking excited. The narrator then notes that the couch "also comes in guy," the camera cuts to the everyman, and he shrugs, as if to say "That works too."

Songco's excellent analysis notes that the real, radical message of the ad comes through not in the inclusion of the male reinvented couch, but in the guy's nonchalant reaction to it: "It's amazing to see Toyota's "It's Reinvented," not because it showed gay sex, but because it showed a reaction to gay sex as oh, cool, OK. In other words, the gay sex in "It's Reinvented" is a big deal because it isn't a big deal.

Songco's piece clarified, for me, why I liked this ad so much. It also clarified what I found so refreshing about last night's episode of Happy Endings, not to mention the series as a whole. Last night's episode, "The St. Valentine's Day Maxssacre," ended with the show's resident gay bro, Max, reuniting with his ex-boyfriend Grant in romantic scene that was the site of one incredibly hot kiss.

The great thing about the moment wasn't really the kiss itself - although it was an awesome kiss - but the fact that the kiss wasn't treated as anything more than a kiss. It wasn't endlessly hyped or controversial or the subject of self-aggrandizing promotion, and by being none of those things, it was more progressive than any other show on television.

That kind of quiet radicalism is par for the course for Happy Endings. The best element of the show is Max, and the best thing about Max is that he's, as Hulu said when they named him the best character of 2011, "just one of the guys - who happens to be one of the gays." Max is just a regular, well-rounded character. He's not a gay man, but a man who happens to be gay, which is a very important distinction. Unlike, say, Glee's Kurt Hummel, or even Modern Family's Mitch and Cam, Max's sexual orientation is not his entire identity. It doesn't define him.

The very fact that the show doesn't draw attention to Max's sexual orientation, instead treating him just like everyone else, makes Max Blum revolutionary. (Similarly, the show never draws attention to the relationship between Brad, who is black, and Jane, who is white. If you think that's not boundary-breaking, read this and think again.) Instead of celebrating Max for being different, the show just lets him be Max, just like the guy in "It's Reinvented" nonchalantly accepted the male version of the reinvented couch. So let's be more like Happy Endings and Toyota, and just give an oh, it's cool shrug to gay sex. After all, if Max doesn't define himself by his sexuality, why should anyone else?

Let's talk about Honda's Ferris Bueller Super Bowl ad

Honda's much-hyped Ferris Bueller-themed Super Bowl ad premiered on the Internet today, a week before its television debut during the big game, in an attempt to build buzz for the spot.

"We wanted to get it out there and start the hype," says Jason Sperling, executive vice president at RPA, the ad firm that thought up the spot [...] "You actually get a lot more eyeballs this way. You get a more attentive audience." Super Bowl commercial aficionados will recall that last year's Star Wars-themed Volkswagon commercial - in which a little boy in a Darth Vader costume uses Jedi mind tricks to start his dad's Passat - became a web sensation, with 8 million people watching the ad online before it actually aired during the game. "We have this Internet culture now, and people are starting to realize the value of it," says Sperling.

via EW.

It's certainly nice that Sperling and his advertising colleagues are discovering the potential of this newfangled Internet gadget, particularly as I tend to assume that all advertising execs are, like those of Mad Men, shocked every time some agency goes against convention and produces a truly memorable advertisement.

The aforementioned memorable advertisement, brought to you by the same company who gave you the Star Wars ad that was so loved by viewers of last year's Super Bowl. Photo courtesy of ffffound.com.

The Ferris Bueller ad, however, is no "Lemon" or "The Force." It's not even a Geico "Caveman." Instead, it is a rehash of Ferris Bueller's Day Off that replaces everything with something slightly worse (which makes the choice of Hangover director Todd Phillips, who perfected the slightly worse-rehash with the second Hangover film, inspired). Chicago is now Los Angeles, "Sunday in the Park" becomes a display of walruses at a natural history museum, Ferris Bueller is now a middle-aged, paunchy Matthew Broderick and, worst of all, the Ferrari GT California is now a Honda CR-V.

The problem here is that Honda is trying to advertise the CR-V. And, while I'm sure the CR-V is a great car (like the Honda Pilot I drove in high school), everyone in the audience is going to remember that gorgeous Ferrari. The ad's appeal is dependent on nostalgia for the film; the whole point is to make viewers remember all the details, including the Ferrari. It's destined to backfire, because once viewers start comparing the film to the commercial, they're going to start comparing the CR-V to the GT California, and that is a contest that the CR-V is never going to win.

Don't take my word for it, though: watch the ad below, and decide for yourself. Does this make you want to buy a CR-V? Or does it just make you long for the days when Matthew Broderick was young and joyriding around Chicago in a red Ferrari?