Should’ve gone to SpecSavers
Mildly drink-lubricated blabber among the film professionals assembled for Fiona’s birthday night out led to this word-image conjunction, which might not mean much to anybody living in a country blessedly free of SpecSavers or their TV commercials. So far, this image hasn’t been exploited to sell products, but it can’t be long. After all, if the late Humphrey Bogart (who died of cancer) can be used to sell nicotine gum (which happened some years back), anything’s possible.
shadowplay 
March 16, 2011 at 10:44 pm
So we don’t have SpecSavers. We have LensCrafters, who are equally ubiquitous. Amusingly, I bought a pair of glasses from my optometrist today. No wire frames or pince-nez, though.
March 16, 2011 at 10:59 pm
Fiona discovered that you can get a prescription free from the optician and then buy the frames and lenses at a tiny fraction of the cost. I throw that out there for what it’s worth.
For a while, Dom DeLuise was appearing in our SpecSaver ads. I was sort of glad to see him, since MAN it’d been a while. But not in a SpecSaver ad. Then Burt Reynolds joined him, which felt downright surreal — these are traditionally really cheap, tacky ads. And they were still cheap and tacky but with a former #3 box-office star in them.
March 17, 2011 at 5:28 am
Can’t get a prescription from an optician in the US. Opticians can’t do exams, optometrists and ophthalmologists are the only ones who can do them, and although I don’t remember what, there are things optometrists cannot do (like prescribe drugs) as well. If you sense the word “racket” coming to your lips, you’re beginning to understand American culture.
LensCrafters doesn’t bother with known stars, or memorable (even memorably annoying) ads.
March 17, 2011 at 10:54 am
It’s kind of a racket here too — they have to provide free eye tests, so they compensate by charging a packet for the specs. I was shocked — shocked! — to discover how cheap a perfectly good pair of glasses could be.
March 20, 2011 at 2:20 am
That bloody tagline is the bane of any glasses wearers life as often non-glasses wearing strangers feel they have the right (and apparently want to prove how witty they are) to shout it at anyone in the street – its a prejudice just like homophobia, sexism or racism, but at the moment its in the ‘acceptable to make public jokes’ stage.
That might seem to be quite a hostile reaction to a harmless admans crappy catchphrase, but every time I hear that line I think the person saying it deserves one of those Three Stooges pokes in the eyes!
In terms of films being callously appropriated by ad-men, nothing how surpassed the jaw-dropping Singin’ In The Rain one, where Gene Kelly looks as if he is having some sort of epileptic fit crossed with a stroke that is causing his face to melt off in certain shots:
March 20, 2011 at 3:15 am
That Battleship Potemkin image reminded me of its wonderful use during the final sequence of Brazil, the use acceptable due to the way the generic gunfight morphs amusingly into the Odessa Steps sequence is one of the first hints that the whole escape sequence might be a fantasty concocted within the cinephile hero’s tortured mind:
March 20, 2011 at 11:51 am
…and the floor-buffer for pram is a witty substitution.
Persecution of the four=eyed seems to be the first prejudice schoolkids learn. It’s quite meaningless at root — no real pretense is made that it’s anything but scapegoating. This is further demonstrated by kids using homophobic abuse before they actually know what homosexuality is.
Just saw Submarine, which includes rather a good evocation of the barbarism of school life.