“Daddy, who’s ED?”
“You mean Mr. Ed? He was a talking horse from a 1950s TV show?”
“No, I mean the man who talks about ED. Is he Ed? And what’s e-rectull dys…dys..”
“Ah. Let’s turn the game off for a minute and go help Mom in the kitchen.”
Except that Mom is probably sitting right there in front of the tube, too. Lots of moms watched the NFL playoffs, and a poll by the Coalition for Working Moms found that 80 percent of mothers plan to be watching the Super Bowl on Feb. 3.
The Big Game is a family affair, with literally hundreds of millions of people of all ages watching around the world. Which is why ED’s surprise appearances can be so… embarrassing.
The good news is that other than ED and a couple of other notable exceptions, like the ad for the unrated version of Good Luck Chuck, the NFL has more or less cleaned up its act. During the playoffs this year, sponsors mostly behaved, with few ads that parents would find objectionable. We can partly thank the writers’ strike, since many of the edgy ads in past years during NFL games were promos for edgy TV shows that are now on hold.
But there’s still ED, thanks to Cialis and Levitra ads, which populated the playoffs, sometimes twice a game. Do they really have to go into such detail? Is there a wild-eyed government goon in a raincoat waving fine print at them and ordering them to inform everyone about … well, you know.
Maybe FOX, CBS and NFL executives should try sitting next to a 9-year-old child while the guy explains on screen that men should consult doctors if “an erection lasts more than four hours.”
Continued... |