You missed the punchline of that commercial.  They actually feel the need to tell you that it gets 20 mpg.

Ooooo… Restore your manhood, wreck the environment and use more gasoline.  How can you turn down a deal like that?

OMG, I didn’t see that one, but I saw one that I am adding to my huge “List O’ Rants"… A woman is at the playground with her kid waiting to go on the slide. Another woman comes over and cuts her kid in front of them. When the first woman complains that she was next, the second one says, “Not anymore.” Then, the first woman goes out and buys a Hummer, and the implication is that she’s no longer such a wimp. “Restore Your Womanhood” or some such thing is the tag line.

Hummer: Restore your manhood.

They’re obviously not targeting women. 
When you’re down at the bottom of the barrel, all that’s left to do, is scrap it.

I suspect the ad is driven (so to speak) toward the only sort of folks likely to buy the damned things: folks worried about their manhood (or, more importantly, how their manhood is perceived).

I found it mildly amusing that they had the gall to say something many of us like to imply about SUV owners.  No pretense whatsoever.

swordsbane, 20mpg is pretty good for a vehicle you can offroad (depending on how close it really gets).  A Jeep Wrangler is rated for 18mpg highway, and as my cousin can tell you, you’d be lucky to get even that unless you stay at about 55-60mph.  Sure it’s still lower than the city rating on my car, but I drive a compact car that’s rated for 22/28mpg, so I can’t criticize inefficiency too much (though I sure can light up my front tires at will )

Glad someone wrote about those commercials.  They were like the Burger King “Manthem” commercial, only without being funny or clever.

I’d be very surprised if the Hummer actually got 20mpg in town.  It sounds like they nursed it through the tests.

I saw both commercials.  The slogans were “Reclaim your manhood” and “Get your girl on”, which I found very funny because apparently the way to get your girl on is to act like you have too much testosterone.

Here’s a slogan for them: “Act like a total jerk while trashing the environment!” It amounts to the same thing.

It’s too bad GM didn’t do the same thing Chevy did, Make Your Own Chevy Commercial.  Because I would rip them a new one, similar to how I did with Chevy.

I hate to say this people, BUT-"Only in America!”

I’ve seen both commercials and they are really, really stupid.  But I really didn’t get the one with the women.  Somebody being rude to my kid at the playground is supposed to make me want a hummer?  Really, when stuff like that happens I just tell the other mother off (very politely) and try to give my kids a lesson on how not to act.  I don’t go out and buy a giant, ugly car.

In fact, I’m looking forward to when we’ll be able to afford to trade in the Pathfinder and get a much more fuel efficient Volvo wagon or something similar (hopefully next year--fingers crossed).  I want a Civic hybrid, but I don’t think we could afford that.

Some additional thoughts:

in all actuality, anyone that wastes money on them, especially the Hummer, is a fucking moron.

[Editors Note: I don’t necessarily agree that everyone who drives an SUV is a moron...

Actually, we’re all a little moronic in places.  A wise person once told me; “people have their defenses because they need them” and marketers can play upon those areas of insecurity.  Witness the success of Viagra spam - those messages wouldn’t be there if no one ever clicked on them.  Or for that matter, the campaign success of the entire Republican party.  Bush is our ‘Hummer’ in the White House, reassuring us that we really are manly despite our doubts.

Of course, advertisers can appeal to our higher nature as well, which is why we don’t have a Democrat in the White House.  As Robert Heinlein once said, “Never appeal to the other man’s better nature.  He may not have one.”

By the way, Webs, I wouldn’t worry about anyone saying you’re less manly for eating healthy.  After a couple decades of artery-clogging ribs and steaks, versus your tofu and vegetables (and bicycling instead of driving an SUV), and you’ll have the last laugh in the manliness department.

BTW the thing that cracks me up about SUV’s is that most of the people driving them have no idea how.  I actually learned how to drive off-road and only then went on-road, but I see SUV’s everywhere that have never gotten dusty, let alone muddy.  I can’t help chuckling when I see someone driving a Jeep slow down to a crawl to cross railroad tracks. 

Anything with a 5 cylinder engine is NOT a manly vehicle!

You want to restore your manhood? Go get an H1 Alpha.

Some additional thoughts: in all actuality, anyone that wastes money on them, especially the Hummer, is a fucking moron.
[Editors Note: I don’t necessarily agree that everyone who drives an SUV is a moron…

Actually what I meant is, anyone living in the burbs that drives an SUV is a moron.  People that really need the off-road capabilities such as farmers, and those that live in remote places, are being intelligent when they buy an SUV or a truck.  But the majority of people that buy SUV’s and trucks today are just morons worried about their image or penis size.

They were like the Burger King “Manthem�

Love the BK commercials.

Just a reminder, these are commercials, not policy statements.  Might I suggest some y’all lighten up a bit.

Webs, as others have pointed out, you were never in the market for a Hummer anyway.  By offending you, GM is not likely to lose a Hummer sale.  Personally, I wouldn’t buy a GM car because I think they’re junk heaps.  That’s a much better reason than any advertisement.

However, I must take issue with this:

Webs: One guy has an assortment of what appears to be healthy foods and a box of tofu that is ever so carefully shown to the audience in plain view.  The healthy eater seems embarrassed with his purchase as he looks behind him at the other guy who is getting a bunch of meat…

...they are suggesting that people that eat healthy, like myself, are somehow lesser men.

At the risk of veering off-topic, I should point out that tofu is about as far from “eating healthy” as you can get.  All soy-based foods are poisonous to one degree or another, but tofu is the worst of the bunch.

Soy plants produce chemicals called Phytoestrogens, which mimic estrogen in mammals.  They do this as a defense mechanism: The soy plants are trying to sterilize predator animals.

Eating tofu causes your brain to shrink and leads to Alzheimers

In a major ongoing study involving 3,734 elderly Japanese-American men, those who ate the most tofu during midlife had up to 2.4 times the risk of later developing Alzheimer’s disease. As part of the three-decade long Honolulu-Asia Aging Study, 27 foods and drinks were correlated with participants’ health. Men who consumed tofu at least twice weekly had more cognitive impairment, compared with those who rarely or never ate the soybean curd. [1,2]

“The test results were about equivalent to what they would have been if they were five years older,” said lead researcher Dr. Lon R. White from the Hawaii Center for Health Research. For the guys who ate no tofu, however, they tested as though they were five years younger.

What’s more, higher midlife tofu consumption was also associated with low brain weight. Brain atrophy was assessed in 574 men using MRI results and in 290 men using autopsy information. Shrinkage occurs naturally with age, but for the men who had consumed more tofu, White said “their brains seemed to be showing an exaggeration of the usual patterns we see in aging.”

Soy infant formula is a dangerous steroidal contraceptive

The most serious problem with soy may be its use in infant formulas. “The amount of phytoestrogens that are in a day’s worth of soy infant formula equals 5 birth control pills,” says Mary G. Enig, Ph.D., president of the Maryland Nutritionists Association. She and other nutrition experts believe that infant exposure to high amounts of phytoestrogens is associated with early puberty in girls and retarded physical maturation in boys. [3]

A study reported in the British medical journal Lancet found that the “daily exposure of infants to isoflavones in soy infant-formulas is 6-11 fold higher on a bodyweight basis than the dose that has hormonal effects in adults consuming soy foods.” (A dose, equivalent to two glasses of soy milk per day, that was enough to change menstrual patterns in women. [4]) In the blood of infants tested, concentrations of isoflavones were 13000-22000 times higher than natural estrogen concentrations in early life. [5]

1. White LR, Petrovich H, Ross GW, Masaki KH, Association of mid-life consumption of tofu with late life cognitive impairment and dementia: the Honolulu-Asia Aging Study. Fifth International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease, #487, 27 July 1996, Osaka, Japan.
2. White LR, Petrovitch H, Ross GW, Masaki KH, Hardman J, Nelson J, Davis D, Markesbery W, Brain aging and midlife tofu consumption. J Am Coll Nutr 2000 Apr;19(2):242-55.
3. Soy Infant Formula Could Be Harmful to Infants: Groups Want it Pulled. Nutrition Week, Dec 10, 1999;29(46):1-2.
4. Cassidy A, Bingham S, Setchell KD, Biological effects of a diet of soy protein rich in isoflavones on the menstrual cycle of premenopausal women. Am J Clin Nutr 1994 Sep;60(3):333-40.
5. Setchell KD, Zimmer-Nechemias L, Cai J, Heubi JE, Exposure of infants to phyto-oestrogens from soy-based infant formula. Lancet 1997 Jul 5;350(9070):23-27.

Webs - that’s what I meant by we’re all a little moronic in places.  Using an SUV for commuting and complaining about gas prices is counterrational, yet the same person may be very intelligent in other areas.  I still don’t have a good word for this phenomenon, but it affects us all.

Consi - I also thought the BK commercial was hilarious, much more clever than the Hummer commercial.  So I wrote a post about it and wow! Lots of people like to talk about commercials.  One of them concluded, from the fact that I liked the commercial, “My money says you’re a guy. And if you’re a woman, you embarass me.” By far one of the funniest things anyone has said to me. 

My other top-commented post was about tomatoes.  Oh well.

Daryl - Now I have an excuse not to eat the horrible stuff.  But all you kiddies out there who shouldn’t be reading a blog with bad words in it, you should still eat your vegetables!  Unless they have pesticides on them.  Oh, forget it.  Just eat freezer waffles.  They’re the perfect food.

Actually Daryl, you don’t have to preach to me I rarely eat the stuff, but I still eat many other healthy and organic foods, and the commercial, while clearly showing the tofu, was making a statement more against healthy eaters which is what offended me. 

As far as your studies go, I agree that Soy products are not for everyone, but the last study I read on American beef stated that 1 out of every 4 Americans will likely have some form of food poison related to eating bad beef.  If you don’t believe this, just take a tour of a making packing facility, and look closely at the diet of the animals and how they live.  Scientists in the UK have stated over and over again, that the principle way Mad cow disease spreads is by the animal eating it’s own and other animals shit.  There solution to stopping Mad cow disease, stop feeding animals that are going to be slaughtered, shit.

Consi -
Now if GM was clever in how they poke fun at healthy eaters, I would probably just laugh and shrug my shoulders.  But there was nothing clever or funny about the commercial.  It is just a blanket statement.

...those who ate the most tofu during midlife had up to 2.4 times the risk of later developing Alzheimer’s disease.

That explains what is wrong with all those tofu lovin’, bean curd eatin’, yogurt suckin’, wheat grass drinkin’ fools. 

The way I see this is the following.

There are few people who actually have consistent utility for such vehicles. Sliding past the H2 (a horrible piece of trash), if you’re not one of those people and you feel like wasting the time and money on a vehicle like that, go right ahead. Makes me just a little richer when you do.

But then to turn around and downplay my “walk and transit, healthy eating (soy milk is a treat)” lifestyle because I’m not dumb enough to waste my resources on that- now that’s stupid.

I gotta wonder what’s going on in the department. Appeals to “classic” manhood had great success in the “Married with Children” TV series… but that was a long time ago, and many times more clever.

Benior: … a vehicle you can offroad ....

decrepitoldfool: BTW the thing that cracks me up about SUV’s is that most of the people driving them have no idea how.

Are the civilian Hummers really offroad-capable?

Incompetent driver or deficient vehicle? You decide - operators are standing by!

Looks like a little from column A and a little from column B .

There are several different Hummers now, but yes, they’re pretty good offroad vehicles so I’d have to say incompetent driver.  It is possible for any vehicle, no matter how heavy-duty, to get stuck with a sufficiently incompetent driver.

Once in Washington state we resurrected an old Korean-war era Dodge Power-Wagon 4WD truck.  It had the alternate-scallop tires and was all beat up and looked terrible, but we got it running really well and decided to paint it.  6 guys with wetordry sandpaper and buckets of water (and a fair amount of beer for some) did a great job sanding and masking the truck.  Then we loaded up the DeVilbiss and shot it with grey primer, let it sit overnight and the shot it with two coats of BRIGHT green industrial machine enamel. Later we pulled the masking and thus was born “the green machine” and we were off 4-wheeling.

On one occasion my sister (who is a concert violinist and quite the city girl) was persuaded to go with us, being my brother, his friend, my sister and me.  We topped a bunch of ridges and went up some steep hills while my sister did her best to appear not terrified.  Then we were heading down a really steep hill (steep enough that you can go up or down but not any variation of crossways) and got the front bumper stuck straight down in a creek.

Now this is good clean fun if ever any existed.  We piled out and reconnoitered a bit, while my sister observed that we were many miles from help and cell phones weren’t due to be invented for a couple decades at least.

We piled up rocks in front of the front wheels, and dug out the winch (which being mounted on the front bumper was just about submerged in mud and rocks).  I pulled the cable out about 100’ and hooked it on an old snag and with a glorious flailing of mud and dirt from all four tires and a little winch help, the green machine just about jumped out of that hole and sat itself proudly in the middle of that creek as if to say; “Hope in!  Let’s go!”

And we did.  My sister never went 4-wheeling with us again for some reason though.  Seems to prefer a nice 4-door sedan.

/offtopic

but I see SUV’s everywhere that have never gotten dusty, let alone muddy.

This is the crux of the 4x4 argument in the UK. I’m sick of hearing petrol heads whine ‘girly lefties, you don’t like cars’. No what I don’t like is a 5 ft woman who can hardly see over the steering wheel on the school run with Jonny in the family status symbol. Because they are so big they take up half the next parking space, the bull bars are actually more dangerous to pedestrians than just the bumper, and the person behind the wheel thinks he has every right to act like a git.  USE THE FUCKING INDICATORS.

(Offtopic

1 out of every 4 Americans will likely have some form of food poison related to eating bad beef.

The EU tried to ban US beef because of the growth hormones that it is pumped with, some of which appear to be hazadous to humans. Bush immediately whined ‘free trade’ while signing more protectionist bills)

To understand the popularity of the hummer, one doesn’t have to look much further than media coverage of any US military involvement in the past couple decades. It has become a symbol of America’s “roll in the cavalry and git ‘er dun” foreign policy. People want a piece of that. It says “I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I’m gonna occupy as much pavement as I possibly can. Why? Because I can afford to.”
I’ve always had a fantasy of ( after winning the lottery ) getting a real high-dollar SUV like a navigator or escalade, and absolutely trashing it in the rocks and mud, pulling stumps, hauling gravel in the leather seats, and such.
Until then, I guess I will have to settle for my old f250 4x4. 

If you want to understand the character of the people GM is pandering to with their stupid commercials, just consider the character of the parents who produced this gem.

Yea no shit.  I always thought something was fucked up about the whole Columbine thing, when I read an article in Time that ended by the author saying, we may never really know what caused them to commit these actions… And if you look back a couple pages, you find a Jock quoted as saying something to the effect, “We just wanted them to go away, no one liked them, we called them fags all the time.” I distinctly remember the word fag being printed.  I couldn’t believe the author either wanted to not print the truth, or really was too stupid to know, but they were tormented till they broke. 

I was a sophomore when the shooting happened, and at my school, those that were treated poorly, including myself knew the truth, which was scary, and those that were treating people poorly, thought the kids were just fucked up in the head.