Gemini and Accord - Loving Movement

A double shot of video is offered for you here on the last hours of 2005, both made (according to the makers) with zero computer effects and only human creativity. The pair offered are also advertisments and they are just plain fun to watch though I do have some thoughts about them both which I'll share first, then offer the links to the videos.

Both of these ads are celebrations of cars, those four-wheeled wonders of movement that have transformed the world and also serve as icons of individual personality. (Do you have a name for your vehicle?) The manufacturing and selling of cars and car parts and fuels and making roads and transportation routesand insuring them and taxing them consume billions of job hours and trillions of dollars, which all go to feed other jobs and services around this blue world. And as these videos show, we have a joy, an ecstacy for our transportation items. (How many car wash and wax locations are in a 3 mile radius of your home? I mean, c'mon they sell hamburgers by getting Paris Hilton to wash a car in a thong with a dripping sponge in one hand and meaty burger in the other.)

First video - which you can access here (via MetaFilter) is for the Isuzu Gemini, which I think ceased production in 1999. Drivers and cars hit the road like the dancing sprites in Disney's "Fantasia" celebrating the change of seasons in an orchestration of sheer joy, leaping through fountains and bouncing thru traffic. The video runs about 3 minutes or so and just keeps getting wilder and more inventive as it whirls its way past you - be sure to watch all of it. And remember, no computer effects.

Second video - which you can access here, is for the new Honda Accord. The video is a sort of reverse joy, a deconstructed celebration of every ball bearing, tire, wire, screw, bolt, and component of a car. The notes on the page indicate again how no computer effects were used, that it took over three months to shoot and took over 600 takes get the video you see. It's a pure Rube Goldberg machine - and aren't such deconstructions brilliant ways to show how we can complicated the simple to astonishing heights of unecessary but entertaining ways?

Some final thoughts - I still want my own personal rocket car or better, a teleporation device. I also wonder what it will take or how long before we move past the internal combustion engine as our cultural definer.