You Don't Say

Tonight's recommendation features one of those aforementioned popular commercials - the ones that aren't masquerading as fan-made videos. The ones that are just funny.

Not surprisingly, it's pretty sexy. YouTube is a great venue for all those "banned" commercials to go viral as they were intended to do. Good news for all those advertisers who I imagine were conscientiously bating the censors; the hard-won "too-hot-for-TV" label no longer just means the occasional, paradoxical TV special.

What is surprising, though, or least noteworthy, is that YouTube recommended a commercial that's entirely in Spanish: title, description, user, and the commercial itself. Unfortunately, I can't understand any of it.



I Google-translated the two captions. Apparently, this is about "friends having a desire for you," and I'm gathering a secret desire at that, while Sprite represents "things as they are." But without the benefit of the voice-over, I can't quite connect all the dots.

This was recommended because a friend recently reminded me of that hilarious (American) Sprite commercial in which a fictitious soda mascot, a smiling sun, leaps off its bottle to terrorize a family. It was in the same campaign as the 'Splode bungee explosion and the combustible acne cream - some of my favorite commercials of all time. I watched all those that I could find.

The point here is, despite not understanding a word of this recommendation, I'm actually glad to see YouTube recommending international videos. I think YouTube provides a great forum for global communication for obvious reasons, and I think keeping the recommendations section country-specific would be lazy and narrow. Lord knows other countries have been familiar with what's streaming on American TV forever.

So, I'll consider this recommendation a prod in a productive direction. Maybe I'll learn Spanish one day, YouTube, and that's a message I can comprehend.