Columns
By Claire Suddath
Well, my grandparents were right. I always thought they might be, but it's hard to trust a generation of people in plaid pants and beehive hairdos. They may drive slowly, they may still give me sweaters with pictures of kittens on them, but it turns out that they're not as senile as the wadded up Kleenex in their pockets suggests. They tried to warn us, but we wouldn't listen. And now look where we are. Rock 'n' roll music has killed our society.
I base this observation on something I saw on television recently. I was watching a TV show, when suddenly a baby appeared on screen and started talking to me. The baby wanted me to buy a Quizno's sub. He had a computer-generated mouth that moved when he spoke, in a gruff voice that reminded me a little of Danny DeVito. I forget the baby's exact message, but I think he was trying to tell me that his father enjoys Quizno's subs, and when Dad's not looking, the baby likes to sneak a bite.
I was shocked and appalled by this commercial. Sure, it insinuated that this mutant baby enjoyed stealing from his parents with absolutely no remorse. Yes, it claimed that submarine sandwiches stacked with ham and bacon are good for a baby. But more importantly, someone was paid to create this commercial.
There is a man out there who went to a good college. He scored a summer internship at an ad agency, fetching coffee and faxing memos for the brilliant minds who brought us the Budweiser frogs and those sad, egg-shaped things that want us to take anti-depressants. After graduation, the kid found a job in advertising and slowly worked up the ranks, from toilet bowl cleaner ads to the "Red Bull Gives You Wings" catchphrase. And then the day came. The agency's partners came to him and said, "Son, we want you to have the Quizno's account. Pitch us a campaign by next Tuesday." So the man went home and thought and thought. He combined his years of experience with a fresh and innovative outlook, and what he came up with was....a talking baby.
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This man is a moron, but can we blame him? Just a few years ago, America went wild over a talking Chihuahua who enjoyed eating tacos. We bought Taco Bell dog key chains, T-shirts, and those stupid wall-cling things to stick to our car windows. This poor advertising employee looked at the talking Chihuahua and thought to himself, "Why not re-create this fad with a talking baby!" And the agency agreed.
The Taco Bell dog was the advertising equivalent of Monica Lewinsky. For a while, America was fascinated by it, even though we knew it was wrong and that the person responsible for making it famous should be ashamed of himself. When it was over, we told ourselves we'd never be so stupid again. But now Quizno's has come along and forced us into something worse, something even more grotesque, something involving a baby. Will the madness never end?
Talking babies are nothing new; civilization has been falling ever since the movie Look Who's Talking forced us to watch Kirstie Alley for an hour-and-a-half. Baby Geniuses came out a few years ago, but I have so far escaped the cinematic torture. I have seen a couple of Ally McBeal dancing baby episodes, but I never saw the appeal. Kind of like bowling. Or Jay Leno.
At least the Ally McBeal baby didn't talk. The Quizno's baby, which, according to the company website, is eight months old and named Baby Bob, has a puckered, Photoshopped mouth that moves around in a vague impersonation of adult lips. His forearms twist awkwardly as if part of a bad Flash animation. This is the best Quizno's can come up with. And like my grandparents, I blame rock 'n' roll.
Music used to be precise and melodic. Composers arranged entire orchestras that included instruments with funny names, like oboe and kazoo. Their work was complex, mathematical and beautiful. And then came rock 'n' roll, and suddenly the lyrics "Sha na na na na, na na na, na na na, na na na na!" became acceptable. Sure, rock 'n' roll freed our minds, gave us hope and let us play air guitar in study hall, but it also made us lazy. "Louie Louie" has single-handedly created two, maybe three generations of slackers with speech impediments. The grunge movement took unintelligible lyrics one step further and stopped saying words all together. Rock 'n' roll is the reason Hollywood can't think of any new scripts and keeps remaking old concepts like The Longest Yard and Bewitched. If Elvis had focused a little less on the pelvis and a little more on pronunciation, maybe our advertising executive could think of something better than a tiny Danny DeVito who slobbers on sandwiches with his toothless gums. But that didn't happen. Society has fallen from the high mountain peak of "Plop plop fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is," down the slippery slope of a Taco Bell dog, and now where are we? We are among the talking babies, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves. But I've got some good news: we can switch to GEICO and save money on our car insurance.