I thought tonight’s trip to Hollywood Video was going to be a bust as I went to grab Miami Vice and discovered that their selection fell off the delivery truck and won’t be in until thursday. So I walked away with the fullscreen version of Pulse and Who Killed The Electric Car?.
If you haven’t seen Who Killed The Electric Car? I recommend it. It’s a lot easier to watch than Al Gore and his amazing Keynote presentation on global warming. Both movies get you all excited and leave you wanting to be more green. But in the movie (electric car) they pose the question “who killed the electric car?” and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say George Lucas did.
In the movie they showed some of the marketing and ad campaign that was used to sell the EV1 (GM’s electric car) and I think it’s obvious that they were trying to make the car (one of the most familiar things we know as Americans) and turn it into something as alien and non-human as possible (Oh, if they had only watched Battlestar Galatica and knew that the Cylons machines would destroy the human race). I guess rather than marketing to the general public or people who care about pollution and relying on foreign oil, GM thought their target audience was sci-fi fans.
How does Georgie fit into this? Lucas and his studio came up with this commercial posted below. The rest of the print and audio campaign featured in the Electric Car movie had a similar feel to them. I even remember watching this commercial when I was a sophomore in high school and thinking “NO”. The movie puts the blame on a few different people but for the record I’m adding another one to the list. George Lucas. Maybe this commercial should have been named Episode VIII?
