Morning Report devoted a remarkable amount of time today to discussion of Labour's and National's first official campaign ads for television. Everyone seems to think National's Taxathon ad is done in the style of South Park. DPF says he loves the "South Park style characters" and KeepLeft, is claiming that "last night came the best proof yet of our growing influence. The National Party has stolen our animated Don Brash for their taxpayer funded television advertising."
Without wishing to sound too much like an animation geek, the style of National's ad (online here) is not (unlike KeepLeft's) that of South Park but quite clearly that of Jibjab. Anyway, the ad is cleverly produced and clearly already has word of mouth, but perhaps National is taking a risk in depicting its leader as a puppet. I can't venture on the Labour one because it doesn't seem to be online and I took a break from TV last night.
Hey, look how fancy Scoop's getting! The video ads are very clever indeed, and the multiple formats are most welcome.
And Three Point Turn has pitched into the election advertising satire game with efforts for Labour and National whose slightly primitive production values are more than compensated for by the fact that they're actually quite good.
Woo! Looks like everyone's becoming the media.
Fighting Talk's Kelly Pendergrast spots an inspired alteration of an Act party billboard. I think even the victim - Rodney - would find that funny.
KeepLeft has another weekly round of awards recognising foolishness in the local blogosphere. Might I suggest a regular special award for unintentionally humorous pomposity? I think it would be keenly contested.
Brilliant satire in The Onion: Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With Intelligent Falling Theory:
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
Synthetic Thoughts correctly interprets my comments yesterday re the release of the Lange speech to mean "we should not be pinging archivists from either organisation. The real issues are at a policy and a funding level." He also points to the first release under the BBC Creative Archive project: a swag of stock footage aimed at VJs (oh, very groovy) and notes that "the bad news is that unless you, or your web proxy, are based in the UK the clips are unavailable." I'd expect it'll be easier to wait for them to appear on file-sharing networks - the Creative Archive licence doesn't seem to preclude it.
WaPo analysis: war on the "Axis of Evil" not going at all well this week.