Ad nauseum

I saw the Leonard Nimoy/Aleve ad the other night, and it cheesed me off. Yeah, it’s cute, I guess, that the painkiller helps Nimoy do his Vulcan salute in front of a crowd of rabid Trekkies, but why do the Trekkies have to be such rabid nerds?

Attend an SF con with me, and you will see that I am the first to rag on the really nerdy, raised-by-wolves, totally unsocialized fans, and I’m completely with Dorothy Parker in that whole “if you’ve got nothing nice to say about people, come and sit next to me” thing. But even I have to admit that the worst of the scary fen are not like the costumed idiots depicted here. It surprises me that some big name fans, like SF and comic writer Peter David, are so enamored of the ad: “The new funniest commercial of the evening [Super Bowl evening, he means], although probably only because we're fans.” But see, it’s precisely because I am a fan that I’m so bothered by this commercial. It disses us geeks, and it misrepresents us, and that makes me mad.

(You can watch the ad here -- scroll down to the subsection headed “Bayer.”)

Much, much better is the way-geeky MacGyver ad that MasterCard ran during the Super Bowl. Mac is an uber geek, but this 30-second minifilm doesn’t make fun of him so much as it celebrates him -- there’s gentle ribbing involved, sure, but it’s lovingly done. The folks behind this ad -- including Richard Dean Anderson -- clearly have a deep adoration of Mac and his scientific dorkiness. The same can’t be said of the Nimoy ad -- someone saw a chance to make fun of Trekkies, and took it.