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Buster The Boxer is John Lewis‘ 2016 foray into cajoling the Christmas market into spending their pennies in their store (something I haven’t done in eight years, and that was only so I could get a 5-year-warranty on a TV that anywhere else at the time would’ve given me one). But don’t let that stop the hype machine from getting into a tizzy, and at least it has a head start on last year’s advert where a girl felt intrigued by Jimmy Savile.
The advert also gives the media something other to talk about than Donald Trump, so that’s a second plus that it has.
But onto the content within – first of all, who would buy a trampoline at Christmas?! I saw a few neighbours having purchased them in time for the summer, but once autumn arrived, they’ve all been left abandoned in the back yard.
The advert is also physically impossible – there’s no way all those animals could jump up and down such that they each get a high return bounce every time. Plus – those animals and rodents wouldn’t all get on together anyway, at Christmas or any time of the year.
Oh, and that’s before I even get onto the fact that there’d be a ton of rodent faeces on the trampoline, about to be added to by the dog. They really haven’t thought this through.
And let’s not get started on yet another drippy cover version making it to an advert, this time from Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away, covered by Vaults.
The Buster The Boxer advert proves what Lisa, once said in The Simpsons, in the episode Lisa’s Substitute, when Dustin Hoffman played her substitute teacher Mr Bergstrom, “You’ll never go broke appealing to the lowest common denominator”. That sums up an awful lot of advertising, today.
And why the title? As an antidote to the sort of rubbish publications like the Metro and Huffington Post put out, like “This will melt your heart” Bleah!
Check out the advert below and click on the Buster picture above for the full-size version.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.