redirected from Main.AdBumper
alt title(s): Ad Bumper
Also known as plain "bumpers" or "bumps", these are the short clips (less than five seconds) that appear between television programming content and advertisements. They serve as program identification, and also as delimiters that help bring an audience into and out of
Willing Suspension Of Disbelief. If they are produced along with the show rather than by the network, they are known as
Eyecatches. They can also be useful to a VCR or DVR user fast-forwarding the commercials to signal the user to return to normal speed playback.
In the UK, TV ad breaks tend to be in the format Programme -> Channel Trailers -> Ads -> Channel Trailers -> Programme. Often two bumpers will be seen, one programme-specific between the show and the trailers, and one more channel specific between trailers and ads.
When television shows are formatted for home video, the ad bumpers may occasionally remain, especially if they are entertaining of themselves.
Fan Subs and localizations of anime often save these for
sake of completion.
Examples:
- Cartoon Network is well-known for its clever, humorous bumpers. Unfortunately, there seem to be fewer of them nowadays. The best known are:
- Several cartoon characters (or the logo itself) in front of a blue background doing Looney Tunes-type antics.
- A huge CGI-city with Cartoon Network characters as its residents going through their everyday routines.
- The Cartoon Network bumpers are currently featureless humanoid-shaped models that interact with their environment to change their color, become Cartoon Network characters, or simply goof around.
- Then there are the other bumpers. They aren't commercials, they don't promote any of the shows, they're just there to be completely random, and confusing. Examples include clips of an animated, ridiculously overmuscled guy screaming and doing exercises, a guy walking into a brick wall with the line "walk fail" showing up, and a guy turning into a werewolf, and then into a chihuahua.
- Adult Swim is also famous for a particular style of bumper, white text on a black background, which the Adult Swim runners use somewhat as a forum. Common messages include random announcement, announcements about upcoming shows and schedules, or responses to fans from the actual message boards. For shows appearing later in the block, image macros are used, and towards the early days of Adult Swim they would actually use "Adult-Swim themed" bumpers (as in relating to the actual time of day reserved for "adult swim" in public swimming pools). Also back in the day, they would keep the eyecatches for anime, so you would have a bumper after a bumper (or a bumper appearing in the middle of the show without commercial interruption).
- Carton Network's "Boomerang" has a series of bumpers that use wind-up toys, toy movie-projectors, action figures...pretty much the same kind of stuff you played with as a kid. Only from the 60s and 70s.
- Better Off Ted has a fake ad for Veridian Dynamics (the show's fictional company) before the first commercial break.
- The Sci Fi Channel (back when it really was the Sci-Fi Channel) had its "I am Sci-fi" campaign in the 1990s, where celebrities appeared in humorous science fiction scenarios (WWF wrestler Sable in a parody of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Moby in a Close Encounters Of The Third Kind pastiche, and so on).
- TBS had brief skits of people calling the TBS Comedy Research Institute to ask if a certain situation they were in was funny.
- Coming Attractions, the Show Within A Show from The Critic, featured Ad Bumpers, usually as a joke at the expense of host Jay Sherman.
- Channel Four's spinoff channel E4, for its first few years, would have ad bumpers consisting of one word, with both bumpers in one ad break forming some two-word phrase, so (as an example) before the ads it would say "Hello" and after "World". Eventually sent up by both words once being "Bling".
