Waiting for Gouda

So Circuit City has a new series of television ads in which relatively normal looking people go out on dates with large, walking, talking pieces of audio/visual equipment. Remarkably, this is even stupider than it sounds.

In one spot, a woman and a giant digital camera sit at a table at a restaurant, or perhaps a diner, and she’s breaking up with it, apparently because he can’t seem to settle on how much he costs. That’s right… despite the rhetoric, it’s not really a date. It’s a bizarre human/machine prostitution deal gone wrong. (Just like Jude Law in A.I.! Oh, damn… I’m sorry I brought that up. Never mind about that. Do NOT start thinking about a creepy Teddy Ruxpin robot bear. Focus…)

But regardless of how you feel about robot sex, there is one thing that is always self-evident:

Use of anthropomorphism in commercials can only lead to feelings of intense guilt, fear, and/or disgust.

Yessir, whether you’re chewing in horror on that cute little bi-polar shredded-wheat guy or heartlessly flushing hundreds of mustachioed bubbles down the drain, you can be sure that your dark, murderous thoughts are probably not what the psychopathic ad men had in mind.

The new Circuit City ad is no exception. A man gets a phone call from some sexy-voiced female TV (which he orders online, bringing the anthro-machinal sex trade into the 21st century!) and agrees to meet her at the store. Then we see him happily walking away with “her”, as she has evidently been factory-installed with creepy spindles for perambulation.

As they head toward his car, he looks at the widescreen beauty with a happy gleam in his eye, and we realize that he must be thinking the same thing that we’ve all thought, about halfway through a good date:

“I can’t wait to get you home, cut your legs off, and hang you on the wall.”

Circuit City recently announced that they were closing a lot of stores all across the country.

Good.