October 19, 2020
I was yesterday made aware of this via a blurry phonetograph of truck spotted on the highway:
the 1990s deviantart-anime-webcomic mister t logo and slogan were bad enough, but the doofus narrator actually says “we pity the stool” in what I assume is a mr.t impression voice at the end of this terrible video. As a profoundly white being myself I, personally, don’t care if a white guy wants to try and impersonate a black guy’s voice if he happens to be good at it, but this one is very bad at it.
what is with this drawing? Am I supposed to want this guy to come to my house and beat up my pipes? And risk getting his jewelry dirty?
I am sure the company has a lawyer that assured everyone involved, first of all, that “#1 plumber in connecticut” is an ambiguous enough set of words to not need to strictly be proven, and also that “a-team” is a generic phrase uncopyrighted with regard to plumbing, and that as long as the cartoon is vague and is never explicitly identified as being a representation of Lawrence Tureaud akadaka “Mr. T” this is totally legal and acceptable. It is still stupid and embarrassing and not sure if it is targeting 50-70 year olds who would actually have watched the a-team and own homes now or 30-40 year olds who knew Mr. T as a proto-meme (in my case twenty years ago literally drawn over a proto-man) and were aware that he said “i pity the fool” about something on some occasion but probably rely on a landlord or equivalent entity to deal with broken home infrastructure, but in neither instance would he be associated with quality leak-fixing services.
And as far as I can tell, T’s character B A Baracus never wore gold chains on The A Team nor vowed to pity fools, but that doesn’t matter; the point is that I don’t know what the point is.
the website makes absolutely no mention of the logo, Mr.T or anything to do with the a-team television program (nor thankfully the insufferable yet equally unrelated to the tv show or plumbing ed sheeran song), but does appear to be promoting that its employees are pushy and looking for silly things to charge you for.
Benjamin Franklin makes much more sense because he was historically about three feet tall and did carry around a wrench almost as big and crawl about in human waste dressed in goofy 18th century government garb and a wig.
i presume this all started when some university dork saw an ad for an “a-1 plumbing” service and then thought
why does a french fry truck need an obnoxious star trek reference –that I only know IS a star trek reference from witnessing so many obnoxious references to it– as its name and slogan? the same reason a plumbing company needs a confused Mr. T reference: it doesn’t but the boss said it had to.
it apparently no longer says “resistance is futile” on the webpage or the trucks but the rest of the goony text mess remains. I would assume this guy also made Streptococcus Paiella with A-Team plumbing’s artist if I didn’t remember that it doesn’t exist because I made that page myself as a joke. Clearly I missed the point of life and everything that is a joke to me is a potentially lucrative business. “Jon” talking about himself talks like I did on web pages that I soon after hoped and stopped short of praying would eventually be purged from existence because everybody rightfully hated me for talking like that. I tried to stop being a corny idiot instead of doubling down on it and having the money to buy a truck lying around.
I never ate cinnamon toast crunch as a child or adult nor actively sought memes so perhaps that limited my mind from entering the contentedly mediocre state necessary to lose all shame and shill at everyone I know to get them to finance my grand bland garbage aspirations, and now the living embodiment of that has been US president for almost four years, and people in my own family that I never asked for money voted for him and look forward to doing so again. But I do not request pity; save that for the stool.
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Charmlatan sez:
Despite the unoriginality, I get It. It makes sense in a barrel-bottom strategy to attract clients. Using a well-known character draws in people who recognize it, maybe even by secondhand, too. My mother told me nearly every business in Mother Country would paint Dixie-knee characters on the side of their shops. Oh yeah, and I guess the laugh of seeing such a knock-off could get customers, too. I think this guy’s been in business long enough for the alphabetical order of the Yellow Pages to count. Know what, this is really just the fanart effect.
Man, what a life that must be. If I had 200 thousand dollars, I’d make an adventure game….to advertise my solar panel installation business! Don’t worry, you can direct and animate it! It’ll be an Adam’s Family knockoff, Abraham’s Co-Habitat Solar. That way we will beat the YP’s algorithm. Sierra games hard. You can put one dope. Just one.
Frimpinheap sez:
i think this is more a case of a vaguely-known genericized character. it isn’t anything new but i think it is trashy. the larger and more polished the production is the less i can forgive the schlubby sort of thinking which leads to blatantly pasting someone else’s irrelevant concepts all over your for-profit business, because it strikes me as more calculated and less “oh i just liked this character, i didn’t realize there was a problem with me using it.”
Popeyes in Blackpool, for example, is so gosh darn stupid that I can laugh at it rather than resent it.
And it seems odd that a real person like Mr. T has less power to stop someone doing this than if they used Mickey Mouse, which doesn’t exist and should rightfully be public domain at this point. Popeye, who is approximately the same age, has no such rights, or perhaps is just less greedy.
Charmlatan sez:
Yeah, that’s a better description of the phenomenon. Remembering that a real actor would have more trouble than a corporation makes me want to rest for the rest of the day.
Okay, you can put two dopes, but they really gotta sell the Uncle Fest…erm..Aunt Festive Solar Power Package.