Like death, taxes and Web surfers with strong opinions about The View, negative campaign ads are an inevitable force. Shortly before the midterm elections, NPR's All Things Considered spoke with two of the men (Dennis Steele and Scott Sanders) who lend their dark, ominous voices to those attack ads, and you can listen to the interview here. I know what you're thinking: if I can't stand those ads, why the heck would I want to listen to the voiceover artists talk about them?
Tell you what: skip to about three minutes into the interview and you'll see why. They asked the men to read nursery rhymes using their "attack ad" voice, and the result is not only pretty damn funny, it also shows how silly these ads can be, and that slapping a spooky voice and some foreboding music over something can make just about anything seem scary. Most of us probably roll our eyes when these negative ads flash across out TV screens, but listening to someone attack the likes of Humpty Dumpty with the same venom as they would someone running for congress proves that these ads are actually much more ludicrous than we thought.
Completely unrelated, but interesting to me, nonetheless: in the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty," Humpty is never once referred to as an egg.















Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-14-2006 @ 3:24PM
Fred said...
You might find this interesting:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view.php/43333
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11-14-2006 @ 4:59PM
Thomas Long said...
You also might want to read Heavy Words Lightly Thrown by Chris Roberts. It's all about the origins and actual meanings behind popular nursery rhymes. For instance, Humpty Dumpty is generally considered to be about a cannon mounted on the walls of a church in Colchester, blown up during the English Civil War.
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11-14-2006 @ 7:32PM
James Kabala said...
The claim that nursery rhymes are historical allegories is not believed by most modern scholars.
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