The Stock Portfolio of Frankenstein

Rejected title: House of Hestletine. Rejected because it made no sense, not least because he wasn't President of the Board of Trade yet.

1990: The Electricity companies are now profit-driven instead of service-driven! Hooray! This surely is a good thing for the consumer, because the happiness of the customers has been made secondary to the bottom line of turning a profit! NOTHING CAN GO WRONG!

The smartest thing COI under Thatcher did was to contextualise privatisation as a get-rich-scheme. These adverts never actually explained what was being done beyond "YOU MIGHT COULD BUY SHARES IN ELECTRICS/GAS/WATER/PISS!" If they'd actually explained that the utilities had essentially been thrown to the wolves, you can bet the next thing to be sent into the public sector would be COI itself.

As for this PIF (for such it is) - I admire it on a technical level, but it's bollocks, isn't it? Entertaining and memorable bollocks, but bollocks nonetheless. Fortunately "entertaining and memorable" is precisely the point - this is advertising, after all, and those two things are the alpha and omega. It makes no sense in terms of promoting shares in electricity - and the slogan is pretty clumsy - but you remember it. Incidentally, Clive Mantle of Casualty and Quest for Peace deleted scenes plays Frank, just one of the character roles he was perfect for, being about eleven feet tall.

I certainly did: a couple of years later, I had an absolutely insane dream that three pixies (which I think my subconscious based on the original Snap, Crackle and Pop, who'd just been temporarily phased out) were running rampant through the commercials, stabbing people and things therein with syringes. I don't know. One of those things was the E in a bulb (which they smashed) at the end of this one. Their victims all uttered the same piercing scream. Have you ever seen a giant E with circuit patterning scream?

I wasn't in the dream, incidentally. I was just watching it. I have no idea why I told you all that.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• advert
• commercial
• PIF
• Public
• information
• PSA
• film
• service
• announcement
• privatisation
• electricity
• Frankenstein
• The
• Munsters
• Today

[knibscratch]

Would you by chance have access to the ad in this series with the hearse & dog in it? I forget the title,I would love to see it again,I was the puppeteer for Frankensteins dog, the puppet built at the Henson workshop in the UK. Thanks, Dave.

[knibscratch]

Would you by chance have access to the ad in this series with the hearse & dog in it? I forget the title,I would love to see it again,I was the puppeteer for Frankensteins dog, the puppet built at the Henson workshop in the UK. Thanks, Dave.

[easportsbig899]

0722072207220722

That sounded looped at the end.

[hotelmario510]

How wonderfully useless that was.

[JohnnyBeatdown]

Memorable bollocks. Thanks for the upload. The bride of Frankenstein is hot.