Sidebar for Plaintiffs

Preface: I’ve said this before but must say it again. I watch too much TV.

Ergo, I see many, many, many TV commercials. They come with the TV, like unwanted accessories. But I make the best of them. No, I do not mute the TV, or go into the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.

I listen and I watch.

Which is how I have something to say to Celebrity Cruises, with their surreal commercial using Jefferson Airplane’s drug-rave “White Rabbit” as the musical background and, indeed, creative force for the commercial:

What on earth were you thinking? Or, alternatively, what were you smoking?

Searching around for corroboration of what I vaguely remember of the lyrics to “White Rabbit,” I learned that this commercial is a first venture for a London commercial ad shop. So maybe the kids at the shop are too young to realize what “White Rabbit” was about. Even though they have someone who sounds quite like Grace Slick singing it throughout the ad. Didn’t the lyrics register with you?

But you have ears. Didn’t you hear the eerie, not particularly pleasant, trippy, sinuous tune? Why did you imagine this song — even accompanied by your (deliberately?) disorienting video with a red-haired woman floating above and around what we eventually notice is a cruise ship — would get me off my couch to buy a ticket for…yeah, well. What are you inviting me to do? Take a cruise to nowhere on an acid sea?

No, Celeb Cruises. I do not want to go on a ship that promises a thirty-foot long buffet of LSD hits along with or buried in the Viennese desserts.

Here are the lyrics for “White Rabbit:”

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call…
He called Alice
When she was just small

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the Dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

Would that get you onto a big boat?