They filmed an advertisement the other day across the street from my office, at the "Coney Island" restaurant, a seventy-year old hot dog shop in downtown St. Petersburg. It's an anachronism, but not an artificial one. You can get an excellent blender-made milk shake there, and their chili dogs are infamous in our office - someone pops across the street and gets a couple for a quick lunch, you can smell those "toxi-dogs" all up and down the halls.
The ad was, so someone said, a thirty-second piece for Blue Cross Insurance. It took them all day, ten hours of strenuous effort, to film these two old codgers crossing Ninth Street and walking into Coney Island as they chit-chatted about insurance. They touched up the old guys's makeup between each take.
I'm just wondering, here, now nobody get mad and start shouting at me or nothing like that, but I'm just wondering...Do you, rc-am, or anybody else reading this, ever actually react to a body in a fiction show on TV (spell it out - that wholly synthetic image, paid for by advertisers, of a body that you see on TV) in any way as if it were a real body in the real world? That "body" is so obviously fake fake fake, it's only a spray of colored lights intended to get customers to pay attention to advertisements, and all the viewers are fully conscious of this. People watch TV to see the silly pretty lights dance and dance. (Or not, and that's what I'm asking.)
Oops, that's quota! I don't think I've ever done this before, but I'm home sick today with a cold. Later, LBO-talk.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net