mondojohnson

I have voiced my respect for the FOX show Bones in an earlier post; commending its hyper-rational heroine and her disdain for pseudoscience. It also has a charming and ridiculously good-looking cast, and its forensics-based mystery tales are for the most part well-crafted.

But tonight the show really worked my nerves with its extraordinarily lame “product placement” for the upcoming James Cameron film, Dances With Smurfs^* Avatar. The subplot revolved around three of Bones’s male colleagues as they took turns guarding a place in the ’round-the-block line for the Avatar premiere. Many of the queue-campers were painted up like the blue critters we have seen in the film’s relentless promos, and nearly half the trailer was played as part of a scene. And to top all this nonsense off, one of the lab assistants who is willing to camp out in line is the sometimes-appearing character Colin Fisher — portrayed by Joel Moore, one of the actors in — Avatar!.

But the lamest part of all was the subplot’s mismatch with the main plot. The main plot was about vintage video-gamers, specifically those who play “Punky Pong”, a clumsy reworking of “Donkey Kong” and “Pong”. The show was asking us to believe a badly-drawn fictional video game with one part of our brain, and to believe that the characters exist in the real world of blockbuster sci-fi movies with the other. It was like hearing an untuned guitar.

[Apparently you can play "Punky Pong" yourself at the FOX website: fox.com/bones]

^* See South Park

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