He’s also been reading up on his Douglas Adams and watching his South Park, because he wants you to remember one simple lesson: bring your towel.

Willie the Wildcat, the worst mascot in America, still appears to be a guy just wearing a head. And not even a proper mascot head, made from synthetic fibers, chicken wire, some felt and a bit of professional stitchwitchery. No, Willie’s head is something different and more hideous. Perhaps you had an eccentric great uncle: world traveler, bon vivant, holder of seven dubious diplomas and one obvious fake.

Ah, yes. Da Mao of Lijiang!

Great guy, even once the syphilis took hold? You found an actual tiger head in his basement once. He explained to you that it came off a beast he shot with Joseph Rock in Yunnan in 1933 “that was feasting on Chinamen like they were dumplings, mind you!.” It was dessicated, poorly taxidermed, and smelled like death’s jock strap, and so old the color had leached from the fur completely.

That same head is what this poor man wears on his head to football games. We suspect he’s a work-release inmate from a county in Kansas with a wacky judge with a penchant for creative sentencing. It’s the only possible explanation.

Power Towel. We think Ron Prince has a very low opinion of the opposition if he believes waving towels will do anything besides start brawls in the stands when one whirling towel catches a trashed K-State fan in the eye. (Towel corners can remove eyeballs. We learned this because we have a brother and an extremely immature father.) It will increase the cleanliness of the stadium, most likely, as fans bored with Ron Prince’s stagnant offense will begin polishing the bleachers.

The only other time we can think of this working–at all–as a massive fan-participation widget was in Pittsburgh in the NFL, where sausage-leadened Steeler fans, immobile from binge drinking and orgiastic eat consumption, waved them during games. Prince is missing out on the basic cause/effect, here: the real homefield advantage for the Steelers are the clouds of aerosolized alcohol that roll onto the field in the third quarter off the fans, which killed Tommy Maddox on the field in 2005.

Don’t forget your towel!

Still, the gimmick affords the opportunity to give Ron Prince the nickname we’ve been looking to hang on him like a rotting albatross: Towelie, who is forever asking you if you want to get high and asking you if you brought a towel. DON’T FORGET TO BRING A TOWEL!!!

Chumbawumba: Back in Business, Bitches! If you thought KLF and Chumbawumba had fallen into the same abyss with the Primitive Radio Gods and the Baha Men, you are totally mistaken. They made this song for K-State, which sounds like Adam Ant ate “Dr. Who” with a side of “Tubthumping,” topped it with a cocktail of Florida State Fake Injun War Chant, and then shat it fresh onto a purple platter for your…um..consumption?

It’s also 1.) totally scoreboard driven, and not cued by the band or the crowd. We hate this didactic zombie fan shit no matter where it is, including the AC/DC “Thunderstruck” kick they’ve gotten on at Florida, and 2.) kind of complex for a stadium chant. A pair of ten-beered brains in the stands will likely only get it together by the last bit successfully.

Fan1: Dude, seriously. Freeman’s 280 easy.

Fan2: That’s not Gatorade he’s drinking. That’s au jus.

Fan1: Should someone tell Ron Prince that the goatee is the mustache of the ’00s? And, like, not in that ironic Seth Rogen in Superbad way?

Fan2: Shit, I get lost when they play this thing. There’s a lot of whoas here.

Fan1: No shit. Whoa..whoa…nope. Totally lost, dude.

Fan2: Wait, I think I know this part…STATE! STATE!!!

Fan1: STATE! STATE! STATE! STATE! STATE!!!

Fan2: You should stop now. They’re not even playing the music.

Fan1: STATE! STATE! STATE! STATE! STATE! STATE STATE! STATE!

Fan2: (Attempts to stuff Power Towel in Fan1’s mouth. Eyeball-killing violence ensues.)

There’ll be problems, we guarantee. But there’s no stopping Towelie here. Rock on, K-State. You get knocked down, then you get up again. They ain’t ever gonna keep you down.

School: University of Minnesota

Ad title: “Hats off to Thee.”

EDSBS title: “Minnesota and Gospel Music: going together like thumbtacks and chewing gum since 1851.”

Setup: The University of Minnesota needs money, so they send you a link to this Flash Presentation. The Flash presentation reminds you that though “you’ve moved on” (and what a titanic loser you are if you’re still in the neighborhood,) the University of Minnesota is still your home away from home. Then they flash this on the screen:

What part still lives there? Pardon us for being literal minded, but we have to know. NOW. A rank pair of boxers we never retrieved from behind the study cube? A clone, bred from our toenail clippings by government scientists working in subterranean laboratories? An illegitimate wolf-child abandoned by a girl we had ill-advised sex with, wandering the stacks at the library and feeding off stale honeybuns abandoned by careless students? WE HAVE TO KNOW!!!!

Subtext: Minnesota is as soulful as gospel, an assumption our stubborn brain can’t wrap itself around. Prince, Morris Day and the Time, Janet Jackson, and Hanson* constitute the entirety of the black musical world from Minnesota for us. Gospel would not be the first thing that leapt to our mind when we thought of “music inspired by the Unversity of Minnesota.” That would be the theme to Fargo, because we’re stereotypical like that and think of desolate steppes, waist-deep snow, and the word “yah” when we hear the word “Minnesota.”

Quit your bitching about the regional prejudice, though–it’s not like they made Deliverance about you. Snow, good manners and a few hasty murders beat illiterate redneck sodomy AND murder any day.

Production values: Low on the visual, since it’s just Flash with a soundtrack, likely cobbled together from some stock footage from the promotions department. The soundtrack probably took some effort to bring together, especially since the singers were probably WTFing for at least ten minutes when they read the lyrics.

Singer: Minnesota?

Conductor: Yes. Minnesota.

Singer: Like, the state.

Conductor. We’re being paid to do this. For Minnesota.

Singer: Oh, yah. Geez. Heh. They say yah a lot up there.

Conductor: Please, we’re trying to be professional.

Singer. Oh, yah. Shoooore. You betcha.

Conductor: Please, really.

Singer 2: What, are we gonna do a Polka for Morehouse next? How ’bout Tibetan chanting for the Unversity of Iowa?

Singer 3: Or maybe some rap-metal for Vanderbilt. WHOOOO-SHAAAA!!!

Conductor: (walks out of building, pops oxycontin while sitting in car, weeping.)

Hits: Not many. It’s got plenty of required university elements: classroom scenes, a professor lecturing thoughtfully, students engaged in ambiguous research of some sort, and the perpetual favorite, a student trapped in the library shelving books. If she’s lucky, her overlords will spare her and feed her a second meal before banishing her to the Terrordome, where she will fight topless for her life versus other trapped Nordic vixens, all for the pleasure of the University deans and cruel, sunglass-wearing pulp fiction god Tom Clancy.

Please. I just want to see the sun again.

Due credit, though, for not including the obvious “Asian girl with test tube/microscope shot.” This time the University of Minnesota wants you to know that our Asian females may excel in architecture, as well. She still ends up holding up something indicating an ability to do math, though, so it’s a Pyhrric victory at best.

I can do math! But this time, I work with balsa wood, as well.

Until a university ad shows an Asian female doing jager bombs with a copy of her university withdrawal certificate in one hand and a glock in the other, true equality will remain a mirage for the embattled Asian University Commercial Female.

Misses: Besides the music? (Come on–it’s been playing for a while now. You’re starting to feel it. Rah rah rah. No? Well, we tried.) How about the ad’s subtle implication that marching bands are not only unwelcome at the University of Minnesota, but will be shot on sight?

Oh god, the pain…getting…so…cold.

Summary grade: C. It’s just a fundraising ad for the internet, sure. But the incongruous music, marching band slaughter, and the surreal chorus RAH RAH RAHing through the whole thing solidifies its mediocre grade. Michigan’s going to space, bitches, Ohio State’s got girls taking off their shirts on the internet, and Minnesota’s got library slavery and cymbal players being cut down by merciless snipers. The Gophers need a PR makeover. Can we get an amen! TESTIFY!

*Not black? Shit, our bad. Still three of the hottest chicks you’ll ever see on one stage, though, right?

Valuable Coupons On Back!!! Of course there are, but not the kind we’d expect from college football’s original prototypical piratecoach. No twofers for shots at Grizzlebee’s? No free app with your third birdbath margarita at Don Taco’s? No commission-free bail bonds for ASU ticket holders? No discounted jumbo containers of Anderson Cooper Silver Fox Hair Dye for the Mature Sexy Beast™ at the local Walgreen’s? The lack of synergy and Erickson branding is simply inexcusable, marketeers.

We’re disappointed, Arizona State. You may as well have used our favorite picture of Dennis Erickson ever–in fact, feel free to take it. It’s him loaded after 18 holes of golf in Hawaii driving his golf cart into a volcano. You just know he’d live to tell about it–anyone who coached the 1990 Miami Hurricanes can live through anything.

ASU Football–if it doesn’t work out, we’ll make Dennis Erickson drive a golf cart into a volcano.

–Congratulations to Appalachian State University on winning the D-1 AA football title over the University of Massachusetts. Clearly too HOT HOT HOT to handle, ASU topped UMass 17-14 28-17 in a godless format called a playoff. The title is ASU’s second in a row–there’s a university that’s going places.

Congratulations, Appalachian State. You stay right over there, we don’t hug.

UMass students, furious they were forced to play through a bracket of competition just to get to the final and lose, vented their anger through rioting as only Northeastern college football fans can: by throwing bicycles and lighting small fires.

“Why can’t we have a bowl system in D-1 AA! WHYYYYY?!?!?” said a UMass student who does not exist, because no one would ever say this.

University officials promises “swift” punishment, a word only used by university administrators when they want to give the whole “mighty as an angry and capricious god” tone to their communique.

–In other “Jesus, we thought Southern fans were restraining-order-bonkers” news: Anthony Morelli receives death threats at Penn State. The lid-flipping quote here from Morelli: “I kind of expected it,” Morelli said. Well, sure. Remind us to bake Chris Leak some cookies. The kind without arsenic in ‘em, because though we might have lost fistfuls of hair and bar tab cash watching him, we don’t want him dead. This is something you have to be clear on, evidently.

–Neal Calloway, UGA offensive line coach, gets the head job at UAB. Head Blazer Job allegedly to Jimbo Fisher first, but oversight board claimed Fisher “too expensive.” Your Alabama conspiracy theory of the day is that Fisher conveniently became tai gui le when the board–whose members include Paul Bryant, Jr.–kept UAB from taking one of Big Daddy’s emergency coaching candidates. Paul’s already scoping out new OL coaches on Georgia Sports. Tramp.

–Montana State is concerned over three arrests in the past year. Early Fulmer Cup stocks for MSU just fell through the floor, since a program concerned about three arrests clearly does not have the makings of an FC champion. Best on Arizona State, however, should be through the roof.

–Belatedly mentioned: noted Euro-American Fisher DeBerry retires from Air Force. Possible replacement candidates include Gary Barnett. Possible return of Barnett, Neuheisel, and Dennis Erickson in one year: we just typed that, and if loving that idea is wrong, we don’t wanna be right.

Oh, and someday we want to be introduced as “the man who put love in your eye.”

School: University of Connecticut

Ad title: �Great Pick”

EDSBS title: �Your asshole dormmate with the guitar pitches a university.�

Setup: A guy sits on a stool and picks out a Dave Johnson Mayer-ey white blues tune. As he plays, factoids about UConn flash beneath it, like “Number One Public University in New England,” and “Record high applications.” As each one flashes into the screen, the guitar guy looks suitably impressed, wrinkling his eyebrows and flashing his obviously whitened teeth with approval accordingly. Immediately prior to the end of the commercial a flash of images rushes at the viewer, and as the guitarist finishes up with a flourish he announces “UConn…(blows on pick)…great pick.”

Subtext: We’re UConn, and golly, we’re improving. We’re also making you listen to this shitbag pound out John Mayer/Matchbox 20/other music of diarrheal blandness in his endless quest for pussy while you hurl up Jagermeister in the bushes. Oh, and you can go to school, too.

Wanna hear me play guitar mmphhh AAAGGGH…(sounds of unimaginable violence follow…)

Production values:

Low. A/V club low. The nicest thing we can say is that the lighting and cake makeup makes Guitar Gabe and his wondrous flannel shirt look slightly better than Betamax. The graphics and Ludovico treatment-fast montage of images at the end of the ad, though, are reprehensible work.

Hits: Informed us that UConn has “RECORD–HIGH VALEDICTORIANS.” This may be UConn’s way of cornering the market in drug-abusing overachievers; if so, we’re definitely making a campus visit.

Misses: Everything. Everything, Everything, Everything. Everything. It’s hard to overstate how much we hated this ad. We hate it like anthrax. We hate it like we hate injustice. We hate it like we hate the noise of someone slurping their food. We hate it like we hate hate…and we’re feeling a lot of that at the moment, so we know exactly what we’re talking about.

UConn found the Kinda Long Haired guy to do their ad–the execrable frat house soundtrack fuckwit who, in the sixties, would have been the guy whose guitar was reduced to shards and strings by Bluto Blutowski in Animal House. (Really, watch the Homestar link. It nails this better than anything you’ll see here.) His strategy is simple: lacking brains, or obvious alpha-male appearance, or ability to earn peer esteem through heroic, Russian novel-style superdrinking, or even the entry-level vocal misogyny that would qualify him as beta male in the frat system, he goes “artsy” with it and learns to play guitar.

The ad shows you just how shitty this approach is for the listener/university habitue. First, he plays an acoustic guitar on a stool. Guitar players, as a rule, should never sit, unless they’re preparing to sing a song about one of the following:

1. Coal miners
2. Death row inmates
3. Death row inmates in a coal mine
4. Killing someone just to watch them die.

The schmuck commits additional fouls by launching directly into a noodling, faux-bluesy “white blues” straight from the milquetoasty pages of the Dave Matthews/Jack Johnson/John Mayer/Sister Hazel songbook for Pussies looking For Pussy. An affinity for this kind of music is to women what a broken leg and loud whimpering is to an antelope on the open Serengeti: a sign of galling distress sure to be exploited by even the weakest of predators. It’s a means to an end, and an annoying one at that, especially when all you really want to do is have a little peace and quiet to drink and throw death-defying post patterns against a cover 2 D in Madden.

Looking for prey? Buy a guitar and become the hyena of the party.

(The other option is actually liking this form of music, which indicates a.) a complete lack of the gland excreting good taste, or b.) an intro-level marijuana smoker who hasn’t got enough THC in his system to graft the Widespread Panic/Blues Traveler/Grateful Dead complex onto his identity–yet. This would also be evident in the not-yet-abominable hygiene of said person.)

The faults continue with the shirt: flannel, like he just waltzed out of an episode of “My So Called Life,” proving that the good marketeers at UConn have all of the qualifications to work in the casting department at the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Youth Division. His teeth have obviously had some hardcore whitening, and overall he looks like the kind of disposable person designed for the sole person of appearing in pictures you will view years later while your wife says: “Who is that?”

All of this made us practically Orgeronnically mad, but then came…the expressions. The mugging, smug, self-satisified array of looks Six-Stringy Fucktardo gives the camera is enough to make us want to drive to UConn and beat anyone bearing the slightest resemblance to a quivering, blood-sopped pile of mush and flannel. He flashes them with the shoddy confidence of a man whose equation for every evening went something like this:

(”Hey”) + (”That’s so deep”) – (wingwoman)/ (patented smile) X (laugh) + (one rendition of “Your Body is a Wonderland”)+ (four beers) = skinny sub-smart blond education major down for the night.

We hate this guy, we hate him, we don’t even know him and we hate him. We hope all the bad things in life happen to him and only him. And associatively, we hate UConn and all its flannelly, shitty acoustic guitar playing kinda long haired self stands for.

The commercial ends with a spew of quick cut shots of something resembling a university campus and the Choadster making a putrescent pun. A Kodiak bear’s paw then swats him to the ground and begins to pull his skin off on camera; horrific shrieks and the sound of a guitar flailing on the ground repeatedly follow. That doesn’t actually happen, but what is a man without dreams?

Summary grade: F. F. F. The worst ad we’ve seen. An abomination of craptitude. Shit, on tape.

A WARNING: Please, before reading anything written below, watch this. If you’re in an office, shut the door; if you’re in a cubicle, invite a friend. If you’re at home, call over a loved one or pet to spread the love, and please make sure you are not eating, drinking, performing any delicate tasks requiring manual dexterity, or masturbating while watching, since this video is the opposite of sex, and may induce erectile dysfunction for life.

(Waiting, sips coffee, waits for reader’s vital signs to return to normal after exposure to the worst school promotional ad ever created. Some of you may not have made it–condolences from our staff, but like Too Short says, only the strong survive. We begin to pick apart this monstrosity now, though words ultimately fail to capture the grandeur of the “HOT HOT HOT” ad. We’ll try anyway.)

Only the strong survive the ASU ad. Watch with caution.

School: Appalachian State University

Ad title: “HOT HOT HOT!”

EDSBS title: “The Cthulu of School Promo Ads.” Why vote for the lesser of two evils?

Setup: “One To Grow On”-esque video effects fade into a verdant mountainside background. Across the screen flash various images of university life in the picturesque campus of Appalachian State University, taken mostly from the pages of the manual all campus information directors must use when putting these things together. Playing in the background is a song obviously conceived, written, performed and recorded by Appalachian State students. The original intended effect was, we imagine, supposed to be an energetic, homespun feel simultaneously highlighting the “high” side of ASU’s countryfied image while showing off some of the less well-known “HOT” angles of life in the Harvard of Western Carolina. (ASU, for the uninitiated, has a reputation as a school where many students display keen interest in recreational agronomy. By this, we mean they like to smoke well-cultivated, brain-crashing marijuana in their free time.) At least that’s what they started from before this ad burst from its fetid, ill-begotten womb and clawed its deformed, hairy, many-legged self into existence.

From what we’ve heard, many of ASU’s students are indeed “high upon a mountain.”

Subtext: ASU is HOT HOT HOT. If you don’t believe it now, you definitely won’t after watching the video. But they’ll try with all the repetition of a Maoist indoctrination video to force you to believe, comrade.

HOT evidently means a lot of things at ASU. First, it means rocking out to music you make yourself, which rocks if you’re addicted to the TBN Songbook of Peppy, Unfunky White Television Church music and you’ve got a choir and band full of willing victims participants willing to make it happen. Part of us kept waiting for a wobbly, obviously drunk Jan Crouch to pop her head in from the side of the screen begging for us to send in a hundred dollar prayer pledge while crying her makeup off her face.

Suprisingly, does not make an appearance in the ad.

The song—oh God, our ass is starting to hurt just thinking about it–oh, the song. The song is a pounding, rolling shitstorm of horrors, from the opening horn flair to the halfassed guitar solo played by the guy in your dorm who was forever working on the opening riff of Metallica’s “Seek and Destroy.” The guitar solo in particular roils our guts, since it sounds like something straight off the soundtrack of Saved By the Bell; you may as well have Screech in the commercial jamming to the song on an unplugged guitar, faking the solo badly while wearing a pair of ray-bans and a white sport coat.

We know Appalachian State likely felt they had some rebranding to do here. The whole push of the commercial is to equate HOT with Appalachian. This would present a daunting task for seasoned team of coked-up NY marketeers; for a bunch of ASU students and administrators, it’s equivalent to attempting to climb K2 wearing a pair of ballet slippers and a speedo. In fact, we can think of ten words off the top of our head that are hotter than the word “Appalachian” right now:

1. heatrash
2. annuity
3. crankle
4. scrofulous
5. plaque
6. pinkeye
7. concussion
8. impetigo
9. Haiti
10. prolapsed

After watching the ad, we immediately came up with thirty new ones lickety-split. We’ll eschew the industry mumbo-jumbo and just say: in marketing terms, that ain’t good.

Production values: Styrofoam factory safety video visual standards. The video editor appears to have fallen in moopy-schmoopy love with the spin and flip effects; at one dizzying point in the video during the sax solo, the picture of the toked-out pottery teacher playing the saxophone (’cause they made it themselves, get it? The guy playing the sax is the guy in the picture! HOT HOT HOT!) spins helplessly in the middle of the frame like a toilet cucumber begging for a mercy flush.

Sax solos: they didn’t die in 1992.

The graphics…well, there’s all the sparkle and pizazz you expect from a professional production. In Chad. In 1995. The spinning, flipping images are trumped on every chorus by the flaming letters HOT HOT HOT! The words appear at least four times in the video, which if you strapped us into a chair, pried our eyelids open, and played Beethoven non-stop for hours on end still wouldn’t make us associate those words with anything remotely Appalachian State-ish.

Van de Graaf generators: HOT HOT HOT!

Hits: At two minutes and seventeen seconds, certainly isn’t short on quantity.

Misses: At two minutes and seventeen seconds, certainly isn’t short. At all. It’s the Tale of the Genji of university promotional ads: first an epic battle, then a tale of loss and maturation, and finally an incomprehensible, unending mess leaving you staring goggle-eyed and gatemouthed when the end finally arrives. We’ve mentioned the song, but not the fact that the lyrics scroll across the screen the whole time like a karaoke video. In fact, if you’ve never put an awkward kibosh on a lively karaoke night, nothing would do it like a quick run-through the ASU anthem “HOT HOT HOT.” It’ll kill the buzz faster than pepper-spraying your date will. That the lyrics are written on the screen–so you’ll read them all, every immortal line– lets you know that contrary to what your heart and mind want to believe is true, this was no joke.

There’s just so much…we’ll just hit the stunners.

If you’re going to flash the words HOT HOT HOT on the screen, show something hot. ASU, in case you haven’t heard, is rife with hippie ladies who’d have been happy to represent the school while wearing a bandana bra and a flowy, translucent dress. The guys would probably willing to do without clothes entirely for the female demographic. Instead, we get Chumley McDweebashire turning in his late copy of Siddhartha in his parka, which unless that’s a hollowed out book stuffed with reefer, is anything but hot.

To be fair, they also flash HOT HOT HOT under the women’s lacrosse team, which works a lot better than the book return innuendo does. The progress is shattered by this haunting image which appears towards the end of the video:

Monstrous baby-eating mascot : not hot.

We’d like to state that the ASU mountaineer looks less like a congenial mascot and more like the fuzzy incarnation of a baby-eating monster from Scandinavian folklore.

…and ye through the blustry bogs blew timrous winds wending their way through thickn’d thatches…the heralding hoary breath of the towering Flegbrak, who did steal the savory child from the comforting cradle ere they reached a thousand days from the womb, banditing them away in his blooming grey beard…

The outfit just makes the Mountaineer scarier, for some reason: perhaps his frightening visage is made worse by the thought of trying to match anything with yellow and brown tartan.

Fear must be an integral part of the ASU experience, judging from the Double Dare torture rig shown below, where freshmen pelt fellow students to death by hurling full 16-oz. cans of beer at each other. for hours on end. We think this woman lived, while the unfortunate preppie in the adjacent slot appears to be on his last legs.

Not everyone can handle the pressure, fear and violence of the cauldron that is ASU, though. Inevitably, those unfit for the environment fail, dropping out, flunking out, or worse. Sometimes, they erupt in violence lashing out at fellow students in elaborately plotted revenge born of their sick, psychotic dreams. Sometimes, they end up in university promotional videos, where they build their hopes by incinerating an screaming class of freshmen.

Welcome to Chemistry 101. I’m your TA, and your final exam is…survival!!! MUHAHAHA!!!

Summary grade: None. A disaster and a blessing. A kiss and a slap. A beautiful woman and the herpes she gives you. Rayeeyaiiinn….on your wedding day….ohh the irony of this ad. Exactly what we were looking for…and yet so much more. This ad actually shouldn’t even be evaluated on the same criteria at the other ads, since it events entirely new, heretofore unseen ways to debase its subject. We’d do an interpretive dance, but that wouldn’t cover it. We’d make a noise, but our vocal cords fail us. Words fail–not even “deflaculent,” or even “walscarfurous” covers how completely fucked-up this ad is. Therefore, we award no grade.

Ad title:: “What Starts Here Changes The World.” (Click on any of them.)

EDSBS title:: “Texas: We’ve Still Got That Bigass Tower Where the Crazy Sniper Was.”

Setup: Actually a series of ads all based on the same model: schwoopy helicopter shots of Austin from the air, done Steadicam style for an even glide through the landscape. It’s like being God or a confident William Katt buzzing the capital city of Texas; or maybe it’s exactly what someone sees after downing their eighteenth Jaeger shot of the night after finals and passing out on their lawn. The landscapes include a time-lapse overview of Austin at night, but also a scary, post-apocalyptic hazy shot of the Austin skyline. (U of Texas: the school for Road Warrior fetishists!) The imagery drifts by while Walter Cronkite, Texas alum, reads vague, visionary stuff over the low-end synth track that was probably playing during your last professional massage or sexual encounter with a Wiccan.

If you hosted a meeting of the minds�a place where the right-brained dreamers inspired the left-brained doers�where would you gather? We�re Texas. What starts here�changes the world.

If Walt had asked us to come to Texas, you’d probably be reading a Longhorns blog right now.

Each commercial finishes with the same finishing shot of the University of Texas Tower and the Texas logo on a burnt orange background.

Subtext: Umm…Texas: we’re big. And floaty and vague. But kind of cool, too, and not hung up that our symbol, the Texas Tower, still makes everyone think of Charles Whitman. Actually, the ad is yet another step in UT’s attempts to exorcise the demons of the Whitman incident from the tower, which began with its reopening to the public in the late ’90s. We wish them luck in their continuing efforts, since the first two things we thought when we saw the commercial were:

a.) Holy shit Walter Cronkite!

And:

b.) Holy shit that’s where that crazy guy shot everyone from!

Production values:
High: not only do you get film stock and expensive aerial shots of the campus, but you get Walter Cronkite, the man who taught us how to speak English. Texas sets a new high in terms of willingness to go for the fancy ketchup when it comes to production values.

Hits: Besides the production values? A nearly complete lack of cliche. Not a microscope shot to be found in the whole commercial. A bonanza for the “branding” crowd, since the ads focus more on the Texas mystique than, say, showing off their epic map collection or new physics lab. A good example of the “Poof! Come to (insert school name here) because we’re special” ad that you either buy from the get go or drop on first sight. Did we mention lush production values?

Misses: The Tower. We know, it’s the symbol of the university, it’s the brand…but we still can’t think it without picturing a crazed ex-Marine with a high-powered rifle sitting up there. Coming from a university with a lesser but no less terrifying heritage of random crime–Danny Rolling–we can sympathize. It’s hard to shake something like that once it’s happened, which explains a lot about why UF freshman girls often arrive in Gainesville with Rottweilers, pepper spray, and a new handgun happily purchased for them by their parents. (No lie–sitting in class once, a fellow student not only owned up to carrying a gun with her, but volunteered to show everyone her piece right there in class. The prof quickly put a kibosh to this before any other university codes were broken and begged her to keep her gun in her purse, even if she had a concealed weapons permit for it.)

(Bonus creepy story: we knew someone who rented a Gatorwood apartment where two of Rolling’s victims were killed. Unbelieveably, they got zero break in the rent. Bummer.)

The Enya-ish stuff in the background of concept ads always irks us, too, but count it as a matter of minor annoyance. What else are they going to play, “Whiskey River?” Plus we’re thinking about the two hot Wiccans we know just hearing it…on second thought, the music’s not so bad at all. But deduct points for being too mysterian about the whole affair: some ads are Stone Cold Steve Austin, telling you exactly how far up your ass his black leather boot is going to go. This one’s more of a Papa Shango, holding up a totem in a smoky room while muttering a spell in your general direction.

Summary grade: B A high-class ad that goes a bit too far into the atmospheric. Next time use a little less Papa Shango and a little more Stone Cold, and we’ll be talking about a veritable submisssion hold of a university ad.

Texas’ ad needs less Papa Shango to it.

Ad title:: “Game Plan”

EDSBS title:: “LSU: Kicking Ass on the Gridiron and Training the IT Midgets of Tomorrow Off It.”

Setup: No real set-up here: the commercial simply begins with a thunderous drum cadence holding together the disparate elements of montage. The theme of the montage: LSU is your gameplan for life, illustrated here by x’s and o’s superimposed in quick cuts on the screen that alternate with images of LSU sports, the requisite microscopes, and other slides that flash some gnarly looking equations and what appears to be an organic chemistry diagram. Plenty of shots of large pieces of technology, jumpy video effects, campus life, profs lecturing, Mike the Tiger, and football fans covered in purple body paint. Insert one curious shot of what appears to be a female midget working in an bank of servers. End drumbeat, end ad on last frame: “LSU: A GREAT GAME PLAN ON AND OFF THE FIELD.”

Mike: criminally underused in LSU’s ad.

Subtext: Football! Tigers! Science! Midgets! Football! No dodging the bullet here–LSU nuts up and just admits that everyone thinks of it as a football school with an academic sideshow. (This is quite the opposite of this ad for Duke, which goes out of its way to advertise that in addition to being a top ten uni, it’s also got mascots, team sports with scholarships, and all that other plebe stuff Ivy League schools tweedily pooh-pooh. ) They make a nifty segue with the football diagrams, emphasizing the technical strengths of the campus, but the Requiem for a Dream jump-cutting leaves us less electrified and more motion-sick, emphasizing the overall metaphor of LSU education=football-orgy meth fit with lecture hall flashbacks.

Production values: Low. Video effects include nothing above the dollar bin variety. VHS video standard is not quite down to “L.A. Crack Den Porno” levels, but it’s not far off. We’ll call it a fair shot to say it’s just a shade above “Atlanta Local Access Rap Show” standard.

Hits: A full head shot of Mike the Tiger. He’s badass and knows it. Being Florida grads, we have a special affinity for mascots that not only cannot be led around on a leash, but are capable of eating their adoring fans in a matter of minutes and more than willing to do so if given the chance. The commercial also earns points for honesty by embracing the football factory image and admitting that people who work in the IT department often shrink to near-dwarflike size after a year or two of study.

Misses: Plenty. The commercial features only three clear-cut examples of the seven deadly sins of a university commercial, but fudges dangerously close to cliche territory in many other instances: look, someone graduating! Look, a black and a white professor lecturing! Look, lots of computer LEDs flickering away! (Remember that the flickering LED bank is to university commercials what shots of reel-to-reel data tape were to elementary science films: the very icon of technological advancement.) A midget girl standing next to a man in a bank of servers! (”At LSU, only the most astute midgets work in our server rooms. Their grubby little hands are what keep our IT department humming…”) Our favorite part is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shots of the campus at the end. It’s as if they did the whole commercial, watched it, and then slapped their foreheads and said, “Shit, we forgot to show what the place looked like!” Tacked on to the end of the ad you’ll find about 1.5 seconds of scene-setting featuring LSU’s terra-cotta tile roofs, which fly by so quickly you could have inserted shots of USC, Stanford, Florida without raising a single eyebrow.

In fact, we bet you could slip nude photos of famous LSU alums into the last few frames without anyone noticing. James Carville is shown on a bearskin rug is in the final frame. Prove us wrong–we dare you! (In case you’re screaming out loud right now from the mental picture we just impaled your sanity on…you’re welcome. )

Well, Mary Matalin would has hit it.

Summary grade: D We have to be tough graders here, especially since this is a public university we’re talking about here. (In the future we plan to review a Stanford ad, trash the hell out of it, and then give it an A anyway, since no one pays that kind of yen to be given Cs.) Earns points for embracing the football angle, but loses it in ADD execution, lack of branding, too many predictable shots of blinking lights and blooping machinery, and criminal underuse of badass mascot. Think about this—would thirty seconds of Mike the Tiger rolling on his back and playing with a ball have been a better ad than this one? Just Mike, lolling around aimlessly until the LSU logo popped up on the screen? Of course it would have, which is why it earns a D in our review.

Today we profile a truly kickass ad, one that manages to avoid all of the pitfalls the UND ads and many more walk gleefully into the teeth of: the Michigan “The Michigan Difference” ad. Enjoy.

School: University of Michigan

Ad title:: “The Michigan Difference.”

EDSBS title:: “Space, bitches. Space.”

Setup: A luminous shot of the earth seen from orbit, taking up half of the screen to the left. The deep rumbling sound that all science fiction fans will recognize as the scientifically inaccurate “deafening silence of space.” Three names fade into the right half of the screen, followed by the words “APOLLO 15″ and “AN ALL U OF M CREW.” A tinny, bouncy noise begins to echo, and a silvery dot grows larger on the screen…the lunar command module makes its entrance, and you hear the sound of “Hail to the Victors” being channeled through a treble-heavy NASA relay, with a male voice clearly dum-dah-duh-ing along. An announcer intones, “Our students move on, but the spirit stays with them.” End with shot of big yellow Wolverines “M” superimposed over half the earth with “The Michigan Difference” beneath it.

Subtext: Michigan grads go to space. Motherfucking space. Not just one, either, but three at a time. In fucking space. Which pwns your ass. We send them up there and they sing our fight song and everyone else sucks our hairy cheeks while we stare at you puny mortals from–get this–the furthest reaches of fucking space. Because being an astronauts is one of the few jobs where a person not only has to be a badass willing to be strapped to the top of an enormous rocket and shot into–yep–outer-motherfucking-space, but you have to be juggling-equations, balls-out brilliant to even think about doing it. That’s us. We rule, you suck, and that’s all too sad, isn’t it?

Space, bitches. Space.

Production values: High. Shot on digital with quality CGI effects. Good audio, particularly on the simulated Nasa channel.

Hits: Superimposing Michigan’s logo over the entire earth, which must look to Ohio State fans like the Dark Mark looks to Harry Potter. Associating Michigan with astronaut, one of only two basic childhood employment fantasies to require a college degree (fireman, explorer, cowboy, and pirate are, as far as we know, two-year degrees or apprenticeship programs. Doctor would be the other.)

Misses: Many young Michigan applicants might not know what NASA is, or at the opposite spectrum, might already be thinking about how limiting the federal pension system would be during retirement planning following their career as an astronaut. Lack of hot ass is weak, but oblique sports reference cleverly ties in heritage pandemic sports mania at U of M.

Summary grade: A. An ad that avoids the textbook pitfalls, looks like it had some coin dropped for it, and manages to convey the most important message of a university ad: come here, and you won’t be poor, ugly, and miserable like people who go elsewhere. (Cough cough Michigan State cough cough.) And unlike those Ivy league frilly-drawers, we send mad bastards to–yes— outer-fucking- space. Top shelf stuff.

Twice a game, the audio-visual club of the university–commonly known as the broadcast media department or “communications,”–makes their own clumsy stab at summarizing the daily operations of a university in thirty breakneck seconds. And how does the average university video tackle the problem of compressing such a busy, diverse community into thirty seconds? To quote one of the finest lyricists of our time:

Sure a lot of things happing at once,
With mind, everyone what�s going on (what�s going on?)
And when every shot you show a little improvement
Just Show it or it will take to long
that�s called a montage (montage)
Oh we want montage (montage)

When you don’t have a lot of time, you need a montage.

Montage! Show everything a student could possibly want to have in a university all at once and make sure you’re quick about it, sparky. The most common elements include:

1. Someone looking into a microscope (usually a minority female.)
2. Someone playing sports–at least two shots, one female, one male.
3. A shot of the campus’ most recognizable landmark.
4. Someone doing something artsy, even if it’s a tech school, because geeks like pottery, too, dammit!
5. A shot of someone graduating.
6. A shot of the hottest guy and the hottest girl on campus they could find on twenty minutes’ notice.
7. A finishing shot ending with the university logo and a video effect stolen from the archives of the NBC “The More You Know” public service ads of the 1980s.

Now those are just the bare bones, but most of the worst ones all use the same ones. And sure, you can substitute chem lab shots or students tossing mice into a particle accelerator for the hell of it. Whatever cool gadgets your school has, flaunt ‘em. And be sure to show the hot people and student fun, since most people in the United States go to college for one reason: to leave home, screw strangers, and drink themselves into changing their major from pre-med to forestry in two years max. Leave the hard truths of venereal disease and mounting consumer debt for another day–we’re strictly selling the sizzle on a five dollar budget here.

And two technical notes: be sure to shoot the thing on video for that cheap, Ron Jeremy porn feel, and include some “ACTION!” music behind it, a sequencer-driven anthem that screams “Office Space Motivational Tactic,” or “Tampa Bay Chamber of Commerce Promotional Video, 1984: America’s Next Great City.”

Do all University ads suck? No–we’re going to profile the best of them, too. We’re gleeful that the University of Florida, after years of making ads of exactly the type described above, finally shelled out some dough, subcontracted, and produced an ad that not only is shot on film, but is actually kinda marketing savvy. Texas has a new campaign with Walter Cronkite doing the voiceover, which is the audio equivalent of playing flag football with Reggie Bush on your squad.

But first we need to introduce the worst of the batch we’ve found, an ancient video that we would have assumed was a joke had we not authenticated it. Enter the world of The University of North Dakota, which manages to make itself look like the finishing school for the Napoleon Dynamite class. Ever wondered what it’s like to go to a rave in North Dakota? Long to spend your university days trapped in fluorescent dungeonesque classrooms, rooting your team on in potentially lethal temperatures, or playing pool in dark, illicit looking pool halls?

Come to UND because we have cool dances and stuff.

Look no further than the University of North Dakota. (Be sure to click on the buttons of the remote–ad one is particularly bad.)