There’s been a lot of stuff written about Avatar’s budget this week.  The New York Times made the eyebrow-raising assertion that the budget was $500 million when you factor in marketing. Then David Poland said it wasn’t, and CHUD said it was again, and I decided that’s a lot of reading for something no one knows for sure that I don’t care that much about. Kind of like religion.

But then I found this new Avatar ad created especially for Nickelodeon.  It clearly tries to sell the film more as a family adventure (like, say, Fern Gully…) than the game-changing science fiction revolution which will change Coke to Pepsi, find your car keys, and make God look like a child pornographer that it is.  And that voice over… isn’t that Don LaFontaine?  He died in 2008, but that voice is either him or someone doing a very good impression of him.  I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but I think it’s pretty clear that Avatar is so good that it brought Don LaFontaine back to life.  James Cameron is truly a visionary.
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(It’s just not the same without Yakety Sax)

2012 is already looking like the front runner for winter’s best comedy, and here’s a subway ad for it in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.  (I hear the tunnels are where Blanka from Street Fighter hides).  Anyway, pretty cool.  It’s funny, Roland Emmerich didn’t blow up any Muslim landmarks in his movie because he was worried about them getting mad, yet he blew off the famous Brazilian Jesus’ arms in the trailer and they let him put a giant subway ad there.  Gosh, I can’t imagine there’s any correlation between the number of hot, scantily clad women that live in a place and the number of touchy, pissed off a-holes there.

[via SciFiSquad]

I’ve long thought that people who make bad PSAs are as bad as child molesters, and these ultra-perverted anti-pedophilia ads (couple more after the jump) are as close as I’m going to get to proof.  When I’m king, those Truth kids and whoever decided to play that commercial with the dying guy with the nose tube and voice box every five minutes will have to register when they move into new neighborhoods.  On second thought, let’s just send them to camps. [via hookedonads]

DCJ Links:

• A rundown of Jewish aliens in pop culture.  Jewish aliens are the best to have, because they don’t make the property values go down. |heebMag|
• Confessions of a Ross employee. |HolyTaco|
• Fruit bats love oral sex, apparently. |Asylum|
• The five saddest Pick-Up Artist acronyms. |Guyism|
• Leaked Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 footage features playable terrorists. |G4|
• Richard Kelly talks about his box.  The Box.  It’s full of secrets. |ScreenJunkies|
• Bruce Lee plays ping pong with nunchuks, lights matches with nunchuks in this video.  It’s not real, but it shows Nokia is a lot better at ads featuring dead celebrities than DirecTV. |WithLeather|
• This chick will teach you how to make the wookie noise, and sadly, that’s not a euphemism. |ToplessRobot|
• Live hard, drink hard, crash hard. |Atom|
• Woman calls 911 on herself for drunk driving.  Key quote: “You am them?” |FListed|

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Jared from Landline TV just sent me this video and I’m posting it, because can you imagine an easier way to do this job?  The premise: Ignoring widespread outcry over the alleged tastelessness of their Chris Farley ad (after the jump), DirecTV has gone ahead and hired more dead celebrities, including Heath Ledger, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus.  Wait a second, I found a flaw in this parody.  To quote my favorite catchphrase that never really took off,   “Jesus is not dead, are you gay?”
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This isn’t news in the sense that it’s new, it’s more like holy-crap-how-come-I-never-knew-that news, if that makes any sense.  Anyway, remember the “Aaron Burr” ad from 1993?  The first Got Milk spot, the one that launched the most pervasive, most oft and annoyingly copied ad campaign in recent memory?  Yup, that was a Michael Bay commercial.  I’m not sure how to feel now that I know that.  On the one hand, you can’t deny that it’s a really solid, perfectly-executed commercial. But on the other, does this mean we have Bay to blame for an annoying, un-clever slogan that refuses to die after 16 years and can be applied to any product with a sufficiently hacky marketing department?  One thing is for certain: definitely could’ve used more tigers.

[via this guy]