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Sep 09, 2011, 09:22AM

Allstate "Mayhem" Guy Dean Winters Goes Coon

Random notes on an enjoyable new televised advert.

Have you seen this one yet? It's like nightmare horror-porn for homeowners or something. It's even lit for maximum terror.

-You know how potentially litigious commercials like these include disclaimers in tiny print? Guess what: romping around in your unfinished attic is no joke. Not because you could trip over a rafter and break your jaw or knock yourself out or anything, but because fiberglass insulation like that shown above can leave behind a nasty red rash that sticks around for weeks; other people may mistake you for a leper, which is a problem if you're the kind of person who other people usually like.

-Also: this is a funny commercial, but there's nothing funny about vermin scurrying and spawning and skittering in the space over your head as you try to sleep. My mother went through the same thing with some punk-ass squirrels a few years back.

-There's something cosmically satisfying in substituting an unshaven Dean Winters for a wide array of catastrophic weather conditions, distractions, and inanimate objects that might attract the interest of diligent insurance agents; the notion of personification is kind of taken as close to plausibility as it can go without animation, Claymation, or gratuitous CGI coming into play.

-I mean, yeah, easily the best of this particular series, a great transition from driveway/highway/boulevard mishaps to near-Poltergeist conditions en su casa as a way of demonstrating that hey, maybe you should  insure your domicile.

-Ha! Watch it again. It's like a home video of Scott Weiland strung out on smack crossed with Beetlejuice.

-I like to read this commercial a bit differently - as, you know, somebody gentrified a notorious crack house where a post-piped Dean Winters was hibernating in the attic. Then lo, many years later, Winters somehow awakens convinced he's a raccoon and starts fucking shit up. Seriously, that's sit-com gold right there; NBC mid-season replacement slate fodder, for sure.

-Mayhem is chaos, and chaos comes in all kinds of shapes and forms. How offended would people be if next time, Dean Winters-as-mayhem arrived in the form of an out of control unmanned drone strafing suburbia, an Al Qaeda terrorist, a hulking, skyscraper-sized Voltronic creature, or a homicidal down-on-his-luck thespian named Dean Winters?

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