Super Mario Bros parody ad, plus upcoming downtime
There’s a rather clever commercial running on US TV right now, advertising those terrible McDonalds Nintendo toys I wrote about last week. Although the toys are indeed not a good thing, the self-depreciating ad is surprisingly inspired. It’s inspired not only because it’s obviously a transformation of the first level of Super Mario Bros into a shirt real-life acted video, but also because it’s seemingly parodying a popular internet video that hit the rounds a few months ago, showing a college play with an extremely similar style. Watch both and you’ll immediately see the similarities.
I’m always a fan of good video game related advertisement on TV, so it’s good to see another notch added to the belt of success in said arena, even if Kotaku is typically as needlessly critical as always. But hey, when you have a fan base that loves the whole faux asshole routine, what do you expect? They know they love the ad really.
As for the downtime mentioned in the headline, at some point during the next few days I’m going to redevelop the design of the blog slightly. I had a lot of traffic and new readers during August (18,226 of you, actually — thanks so much for the support!), and I noticed from my statistics that a lot of people aren’t finding my older posts and such too easily. So, I’m going to bring back the sidebar and rework the design somewhat so it continues to fit onto 800×600, used by a whopping 4% of you. It might be a day or two of downtime depending on how many issues I run into. I know it being down isn’t going to wreck your day or anything, but I just thought I’d throw out a note about it.
What do you mean, it won’t wreck my day? I will be bereft!