Toronto Lexus Ad Features Iggy Azalea, General Awfulness
I’LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL
There are very few things in this world as precious to us as bad local commercials. Without horrible small business think-tanks, we wouldn’t have ads like this one for the St. Joseph’s East Hills Shopping Center, which also inexplicably features mid-2000s Miley Cyrus rapping about backpacks:
“These deals will hit you like a wrecking ball.”
And who can forget this absolutely incomparable ad for Flea Market Montgomery, wherein Sammy Stephens raps about the venue’s striking similarities to a mini mall (hey-hey):
But there’s a special place in bad local commercial hell reserved for auto dealerships. It’s an easy spot to find: it’s the one marked by a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tubeman.
Miley Cyrus, circa 2038
I thought that “We Rep the Southside” had taken the crown of worst car commercial of 2014 back in March, and with pretty good reason. It’s like bad commercial heaven: it’s got out-of-touch white people trying to affect rap culture (badly), terrible rhymes, and plenty of shilling (and for the RVR, no less).
Need an SUV? Here’s a crotch!
But wait! A challenger has appeared in the form of Lexus of Oakville up in Toronto, who put forth this positively atrocious video that features a lip-sync parody of this past summer’s bash-yourself-in-the-face-with-a-lead-pipe-until-it-goes-away earworm, “Fancy.”
What is it about Canadians and terrible car commercials?
I’m inclined to give a slight nod to the perpetually embarrassing Nelson Berry from Southside Mitsubishi in Edmonton, if only because he actually had to sit down and write down lyrics for his pièce de répellence. The folks at Lexus of Oakville, on the other hand, simply walk around and pretend that they’re Iggy Azalea (and why anyone would want to do that in the first place is beyond our comprehension). And, boy, do they ever walk around and pretend to do stuff.
Even if it’s not worse than “We Rep the Southside,” this “Fancy” parody—if you can call a bunch of tone-deaf old people attempting to dance around while lip synching a “parody” any more than you would call it a “bad idea that should have been killed with fire”—is remarkably terrible.
Oh, look! A preponderance of distracted white dudes raising the roof! How cheeky!
The saving grace here is that it’s doing nothing to denigrate the quality of the original song. Indeed, “Fancy” is obnoxious in and of its own right, so if you really insist on watching a bunch of bad acting/fake singing, you’d be best served to hit the mute button first.
The ad was a means to raise interest in Lexus of Oakville’s grand opening event, which seems to have gone off without a hitch. 663 or so people showed up so that they could grub on free food and watch trapeze artists flip around, and the dealership has not yet been closed in order to make way for Circuit City.
I can only assume that the video released after the actual event, otherwise opening night would have surely been a barren wasteland. That, or Toronto is filled with lovers of schadenfreude.
And of awkward, awkward dancing
This “Fancy” parody is only tangentially a car commercial. Yes, it takes place in a dealership. Yes, you occasionally see a Lexus. Apart from that, this does nothing to tell you anything about Lexus of Oakville or their products. The only thing it really tells you with any certainty: making commercials is not their forte.
Look, it’s actually a car! They’re showing OH MY GOD GRANDPA WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING YOUR NIPPLES LIKE THAT?
Kyle S. Johnson lives in Cincinnati, a city known by many as “the Cincinnati of Southwest Ohio.” He enjoys professional wrestling, Halloween, and also other things. He has been writing for a while, and he plans to continue to write well into the future. See more articles by Kyle.