Blow the force

From X-entertainment, "Born into a family with three much older moviegoing brothers, I was taught the ways of The Force from very early on. I used this so-called "Force" to make my parents buy me every Star Wars toy, game, doodad and gizmo I could find. Somehow, the official Star Wars tissue brand eluded me.The Puffs Company hooked up with George and an Ugnaught to provide The Empire Strikes Back Puffs tissues, which were just your ordinary everyday Puffs tissues…in a cooler box. Actually, there were several ESB boxes available, depicting everything from a Dagobah scene to an AT-AT onslaught on Hoth. I guess you bought the Dagobah tissues when you had one of those really mindfuckingly contemplative flus, and the AT-AT attack box when you just had to viciously sneeze constantly.

Though unmentioned in the commercial from which the screengrabs above were taken, each box had a cutout character poster on the bottom. The posters were left uncolored — that task was left for any kids brave enough to try to color in laminated cardboard with a Crayola crayon. Shit don't work, son.

While the television commercial is technically an '80s ad, its motif is far more similar to the many Star Wars toy commercials of the '70s, where the featured product was given a back-seat, so a kid with limited vocational skills could say more in thirty-seconds than John Moschitta Jr. ever did. In the case of the Puffs commercial, at least he's sharing the wordcount with an actress playing his Maw, and later, with C-3P0 and R2-D2. No, really.

First, the mother stuff. She walks in, and the kid's obviously sick, but he wants to play football, so he's acting all bitchy about it. Mom knows just what to do. Yanking a box of Star Wars Puffs from thin air, the child accepts his fate gracefully, apparently believing that being stuck inside sick with a Star Wars tissue box is better than being outside playing with friends. It's not that I don't wholeheartedly agree, but it's hard to imagine a kid who liked football shaking on a deal like this. The football kids were better than us, see.

Quickly losing himself in a sea of Star Wars, the kid's bedroom turns into outer space, and C-3P0 and R2-D2 appear, evidently able to walk around outer space as if it had full gravity and a system of invisible sidewalks. The Droids never address our snot-ridden hero directly, making obvious the fact that we're reusin' some of that fancy green screen footage shot for the film here.

Returning to reality as his mother reenters the room, the child is now a huge proponent of having a cold, and he "can't wait to sneeze again!"

Wait until he notices the cutout poster on the bottom of the box. Boy's gonna piss himself."