Thursday, October 24, 2002

Ugly Is As Ugly Does: You know that Cadillac commercial - the one where the guy is driving a beautiful '50s era convertible and he's stuck in traffic. Suddenly he pulls off onto a long straight country road, Led Zeppelin is playing, supposed to symbolize freedom from the stifling world in some way, I assume. So he's cruising along happily in his old Caddy. Then he starts seeing new model Caddies: one passes him - it's driven by a woman who is checking him out - he spots one of those behemoth Escalades, he sees the latest roadster. The idea is to link the amazing new Cadillacs to the long tradition of fine Caddies going back to the '50s convertible he's driving.

But there's a minor problem that seems to have eluded the Cadillac marketing team. The new Caddies are BUTT-UGLY. I mean really really nasty looking. GM produced the ugliest car ever in the Aztek, then obviously applied the same philosophy to the entire Caddy line up. Wretch. The front ends of those cars look like they were assembled in the course of a Junkyard Wars episode gone horribly wrong. Then they draw a direct comparison to that gorgeous, stylish '50s convertible. You have got to be kidding me. Perhaps the Americans with Disabilities Act requires Cadillac to hire a certain number of blind people. This would rate high on the Unintentional Comedy Scale, but it's even too dumb to be funny.