Word: carvey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WHAT WERE those hokey dancing taco-and-bell doing on the premiere of Dana Carvey's new comedy show two weeks ago--was this a plug or a parody of lead sponsor Taco Bell? It was hard to tell as the fast-food duo sang, "We're paying him a fortune to use our name, 'cause he's a shameless whore...
...fact, this was an odd TV moment when parody and plug became one. The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show was intended to be an ironic resurrection of 1950s-style brand-name TV shows like The Lux Video Theatre or The U.S. Steel Hour. The deal originally struck between ABC and Pepsico, Taco Bell's parent company, was that each week a different member of the Pepsi family would serve as "both title and target" for Carvey's wry satire, positioning the sponsor as quite the cool dude for rope-a-doping a few edgy punches...
...maybe it sounded better on paper. Taco Bell pulled out of future Carvey shows the day after the premiere, though the company wouldn't say whether it objected to the ribald skits (which included a prosthetically enhanced President Clinton breast-feeding animals) or the darts aimed at the ad business. ABC quickly promised to tame the show, and Pepsico decided to limit sponsorship to its less familial, more attitude-seeking brands, and thus was born last week's somewhat safer episode, The Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show...
Whatever its fate (or name), the Carvey show illustrates the increasingly blurred line between programming and ads on network television. Of course, the ad-driven medium has never been a pristine art form, its practitioners not generally averse to bending over backward to please sponsors. But lately, advertising's osmotic bleed into entertainment has turned into an arterial gush. Murphy Brown wrote John F. Kennedy Jr. into a script so he could promote his magazine, George; Diet Coke hired the writers and producers of Friends to create a mini episode-cum-ad starring the entire cast; and, most famously, Elizabeth...
...writers, actors and producers who must do their sponsors' bidding feel used? Not necessarily. Carvey says the parody- as-plug idea was his. "It was just kind of boring to call it The Dana Carvey Show," he says. "The idea came off of sports shows like the Doritos Cotton Bowl." Actually, it was the Mobil Cotton Bowl, so maybe in-show product placement isn't as effective as advertisers hope. At any rate, Carvey isn't quite the "whore" his show alleges. Though Pepsico pays ABC extra for the special treatment, "if they were paying me more, I wouldn...