Be Aware: the van Damme Ad explained to non-French speakers
Over at Warlock Therapy, Jagoex was puzzled at the French “What’s your game” commercial featuring Jean-Claude van Damme.
And there’s probably good reason for that. To the international viewer, van Damme is probably just that Belgian martial arts actor made famous by Bloodsport who then went on to star in worse and worse movies. His memorable quotes available in English surely aren’t anything special or something.
In the French language, it’s a different matter though. Mixing French in English, he has produced gems such as these (italics mark parts when he speaks in English):
I have a fascination with air. If you were to remove the air from the sky, all the birds would fall to the ground… and planes too… At the same time you can’t touch the air, it exists and doesn’t exist… it nourishes man when he isn’t hungry… It’s magic… Air is beautiful at the same time you can’t see it, it’s soft and you can’t touch it… air is a bit like my brain
I love peanuts. You have a beer and get fed up with the taste, so you grab some peanuts. Peanuts are sweet and salty, strong and tender, like a woman. Eating peanuts it’s a really strong feeling. And afterwards you want another beer. Peanuts is the Perpetual Motion in the reach of mankind.
Between you and me there’s a product called a product, and that product is called oxygen, so if you do this (breathes in and out loudly) you live but if I kill all the oxygen like on the moon, you die.
We don’t percieve the time the same way depending on our species, which lets me move my hand (?) between you and me like this, because for oxygen, a second is perhaps 10 seconds and for concrete, a second may be 10 miliseconds.
This is just a short example out of the long list of memorable quotes JCvD has graced French culture with over the past decades, and the usual reaction varies from a simple wha…? to dismissing him as having had too many blows to the head back when he was a kickboxer.
Now to be frank, I truly think he’s just a misunderstood modern metaphysicist who happens to have too many ideas colliding in his brains in several languages trying to get voiced at the same time, which makes him appear as a loonie in the French language, but I’m not here to discuss the particuliar of van Damme’s views on parallel universes and hooking a possible future to your present to make the future come true (too tough to translate the way he phrased it, but while it sounds crazy on surface, sci-fi has thrived on such concepts since Azimov).
No, what makes the WoW commercial brilliant is how it plays on the public persona of the whacky lunatic. It may be odd or even disturbing for the international viewer, but it fits van Damme like a well tailored suit, just like the Mr T commercial is tailored to his own persona and his A-Team character.
And that, in my book, makes it a damn good commercial.
