VW’s Darth Vader commercial has smitten the fickle public.
You’ve seen the latest VW commercial—the one that features a pint-sized Darth Vader trying to manipulate everyday household items like dogs, teddy bears and lunch.
The commercial has racked up over 15 million YouTube views in under a week and made it into the upper echelons of the best Super Bowl commercials, 2011 not being a bad year for them.
Super Bowl commercials are a three-way mix of pop-cultural porn, mind control and corporations earnestly shilling their wares. It’s where mass marketers start off the year and try their hardest to get consumers to adopt one-liners, a la “wazzuuup.” It’s fun and we embrace it and most of the time we don’t notice the sneaky nuero-linguistic programming.
Unbelievably, The Darth Vader commercial does not embrace the dark side of crass commercialism. 100% of all living, breathing human beings wish they could move things with their mind, and I’m willing to bet, based on personal experience and various conversations with humongous nerds (rock stars included), that most try it more often than they’d like to admit.
I always feel some third-party embarrassment when I see a kid decked out in full Darth Vader gear on Halloween. It’s highly emblematic of unstoppable nerdiness. He’s been made cute and fun over the past 30 years, but in the initial films Darth Vader mostly just killed people, even the guys in the stupid helmets that worked for him. Perhaps kids are drawn to him because he reminds them of their parents.
In America, in the Middle East, in the banking sector and in both houses of Congress, the dark side couldn’t be more prevalent. But there’s still no cooler way to turn on a car.
