Welcome To The Party Pal! Car Commercials

About a fourth of the way through Die Hard, Sgt. Al Powell has completed his very lazy patrol of the Nakatomi Plaza. With Twinkies and his pregnant wife on his mind, he gets in his car and begins to pull away. From inside the car, we see a body fall from the building and smash through the windshield of his car, scaring the bejesus out of Sgt. Powell. The body was a very strong message sent from John McClane that there's some heavy shit going on in the Nakatomi Plaza that Sgt. Powell needs to know about. As the patrol car backs away amidst terrorist gunfire McClane yells out the line "Welcome To The Party Pal!" It's a good line and I use it often in life when someone finally figures out the obvious. There are lots of examples in Hollywood when someone should say "Welcome To The Party Pal!" Like when Paul Haggis says he has a dream about bad race relations in Los Angeles and decides to make a really heavy handed movie about it called Crash. But for me to talk about that in depth would be so ho-hum and unoriginal because I have bitched about that for quite some time as has everyone else.



So something more recently that's really irked me is the slew of car commercials promoting better gas mileage. Commercials for Kia and for Dodge where there are songs about people forgetting where the gas cap is located or even forgetting about gas altogether. Wow, a car that gets good gas mileage? Seriously? I mean, why not wait for a barrel of oil to reach $150 before promoting good gas mileage? Why not wait for gas to reach $4.00 a gallon? Why now? Europe has been making fuel efficient cars for close to 30 years now and here we are touting cars that get 34 miles per gallon. I love these car manufacturers who advertise better gas mileage like they invented it and broadcast it like no one was thinking about it before now. And you can sing all the songs you want, but 34 mpg ain't too much so you'll be thinking about gas a lot sooner than you think. Now go and invent a car that gets 50 mpg or better yet requires no gas at all and then sing your heart out. Sing until your lungs bleed. Until then, quit telling us what we already know and making it seem like some kind of revelation.