I’ve been entertaining visiting family over the weekend so I’ve been a bit remiss with the old One a Day posts. This is just a quickie.
I just saw this advert on Dutch TV, which features Fidel Castro arriving at what looks like a hippie commune populated by group of famous ‘revolutionaries’.
Mao’s putting out the bin bags, Lenin’s playing old 8-bit computer games, Gandhi’s flipping through tv channels and eating junk food and Karl Marx is asleep with a copy of ‘Capital’ magazine on his lap. The advert also features Martin Luther King, Vietcong leader Ho Chi Minh and Rosa Luxemburg, a German revolutionary and socialist theorist (I had to do a bit of a research on that last one, but apparently she’s well known in Germany).
The idea is that they’ve all become lazy and complacent and too bogged down with the mundane day-to-day stuff rather than high-minded ideals. The advert ends with Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Karl Marx sat on the porch looking wistfully off into the distance, and Che announcing it’s time for a revolution.
Anyway I think it’s a fantastic scenario, one that could be explored in a lot more depth in a book, a play or a film. Perhaps, if we could find some way of reanimating these people, we could put them in a Celebrity Big Brother reality tv scenario? I wonder how they’d get on?
It’s just a bit disappointing such a good idea has been used in the service of selling such an incredibly dull and forgettable car.
