Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Video Game Music on Television: Campbell's soup "Wisest Kid" Super Mario Commercial

While I was cooking a few days ago, I heard a commercial on TV that immediately caught my attention with its use of game audio.  If you haven't seen it, check out this Campbell's Soup commercial.  


What I find interesting about the commercial is that the sound effects are from the original SMB game, yet the kids are playing a much more modern Mario game on the Wii.  In other words, the images are to pull in the kids, whereas the sounds are clearly directed at someone my age, who might likely be buying soup for my (potential) kids!  It's an interesting, clash of nostalgia in the sounds with modern visual images.

Furthermore, consider the sounds we hear immediately in the commercial: power-up, down a pipe, fireball.  They almost don't make sense.  They're simply all crammed together to create a wash of sound memory for anyone who's played the original game.  Why does the mom catching the soup make the "death" sound?  Is it no longer cool now that mom has it?

In any case, the use of these sounds worked! The commercial got me to investigate more about the soup, though I don't eat Campbell's condensed.

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