Commercials that don't suck: Gatorade AM

I'm not sure I buy the idea behind Gatorade AM: the flavors didn't really seem all that much more "morning"-like to me, and I'm moderately suspicious of the implication that your body might need a different kind of replenishment at 7 am as opposed to 2 pm. I guess it's possible, but until someone rolls out a research paper for me, I'm going to go ahead and assume they're just hoping this will sell more Gatorade (perhaps their research has shown that people are less likely to drink Gatorade in the early hours and they figure some re-branding is the way to go?).

That said, I like the ad:



I'm a fan of pretty much anything showing celebrities (including athletes) in nontraditional milieus. In this case, we've got Peyton Manning, Kristine Lilly and Abby Wambach playing "schoolchildren," Mia Hamm as a soccer mom, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a retiree, and Kevin Garnett as the classic postwar milkman, the latter of which is particularly entertaining to me. The music gives the whole thing a cheery, bright feeling, and the idea of having the Gatorade man replace your old bottle with a fresh one is simultaneously insanely incongruous but also both amusing and oddly quaint. It's one of those pictures of a world that doesn't exist - even if you replaced all the famous faces with regular people and the Gatorade with milk, there's no suburb in America that actually functions as pictured, at least not anymore - but is still capable of putting a smile on your face. Or mine, anyway. Gatorade, you get a gold star.