Around 2010 or so, DirecTV launched an advertising campaign regarding their service.
Inspired by the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the commercials consist of people being disappointed in their cable services, followed by a series of unfortunate events happening, and long story short, the narrator admonishes viewers to switch to DirecTV.
The format is like this: "When something adverse related to cable happens, you do A. When you do A, it causes B." And so on until "...it causes G. Don't let G happen. Get rid of cable and upgrade to DirecTV."
Several of these commercials can be viewed here
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This campaign features examples of:
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Sometimes the final item is less bad than the item preceding it. For example:When you go to Vegas, you lose everything. And when you lose everything, you sell your hair to a wig shop. Don't sell your hair to a wig shop.
- Attending Your Own Funeral: One customer fakes his death and attends his own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly."Don't attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly."
- Beard of Sorrow: The guy collecting stray animals grows a long beard.
- Big Blackout: A man's desire to feel free leads to him going hang gliding, crashing into a power line, causing the grid to go down, causing mass rioting, and looting, leading to the man's father getting punched over a can of soup.
- Cable/Satellite Mudslinging: The commercial depicts cable as so inconvenient that it indirectly ruins the customer's life.
- The Cameo: Charlie Sheen makes an appearance in one of the ads, wanting to reenact scenes from Platoon.
- Crazy Cat Lady: Because his wife left him over his supposed anger issues, a lonely man starts adopting strays.
- Disaster Dominoes: In each commercial, the inconveniences of cable lead to a series of increasingly worse circumstances that result in the customer's life being ruined.
- Dye or Die: When you fake your death, you dye your eyebrows.
- Epic Fail: When you run along rooftops, you fall into a dinner party.
- Escaped Animal Rampage: A gorilla named Jimbo escapes from his cage and attacks (body slams) the protagonist at his home after the guy they gave his job to made a mistake and left Jimbo's cage unlocked when he was tending to another animal.
- Eyepatch of Power: Parodied. "When you get an eyepatch, people think you're tough."
- Faking the Dead: One guy saw a thing "you shouldn't see" which caused him to fake his own death and attend his own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly.
- Insane Troll Logic: All over the place. From a man deciding to become a vigilante after a few Karate lessons, to a man forced to become a village fisherman because of a bad reaction to being stung by "something exotic."
- Miscarriage of Justice: If you have cable and your picture freezes, your work suffers, the wrong man goes to jail, he has time to think, he thinks about you, a lot, and your house explodes.
- Mushroom Samba: A man who was stranded in the wild after a car accident caused by his sleep-deprivation due to getting tense from his cable being on the fritz and has to survive, eats wild berries and hallucinates a swarm of butterflies, that he chases into "something highly illegal."
- Overly Long Gag: The number of steps a commercial takes to reach its endgame vary, and can number up to quite a few.
- Percussive Therapy: One commercial had a father smack the armrest of his chair in frustration over his cable problems. This left an impression on his young daughter, who grew up to be a rebellious hellion who marries a bad boy. The commercial concludes that if this series of events happen when your cable's on the fritz, "you will get a grandson with a dog collar".
- Prisons Are Gymnasiums: The wrongly convicted man is shown working out in prison.
- Rage Against the Legal System: The wrongly convicted man blows up the lawyer's house.
- "Rear Window" Witness: When you start staring out windows, you see things you shouldn't see.
- Roof Hopping: When you become The Fist of Goodness, you run along rooftops, which results in you crashing through a sky roof and into a dinner party.
- Rule of Funny: None of these horrible outcomes are very likely, but they're funny.
- Slippery Slope Fallacy: The crux of the ads is how having cable will lead to all sorts of ridiculous misfortune.
- Slow Electricity: When the glider crashes into the pylon, the resulting power outage hits the city district by district.
- Space Whale Aesop: The point of the commercials is, "If you don't get rid of cable, something bizarrely unfortunate will happen to you."
- Stuff Blowing Up: The wrongly convicted man decides to blow up the lawyer's house.
- Viva Las Vegas!: "When you feel like a winner, you go to Vegas." You then go on to lose everything you had and have to sell your hair to a wig shop to get money.
- You Can't Go Home Again: A man is bitten by "something exotic" while he is on vacation and quarantined. He is eventually forced to live as a fisherman the locals call "Big Fatty-Face".
