Have you seen that icky new DirecTV commercial? No, not the really confusing one with Black Eyed Peas hanging out on the moon and in the jungle, the one with new footage of David Spade and old footage (obviously) of Chris Farley re-enacting the “fat guy in a little coat” scene from Tommy Boy. In the ad, Spade whines about spending time with “two tons of fun” and wishes he could watch HDTV instead. Aside from demonstrating once again that a dead Chris Farley is much funnier and more endearing than a living David Spade, the ad just seems sort of gross and wrong, and lots of folks on the Interwebs are complaining about it. So many folks, in fact, that Spade issued a response through his publicist, saying it’s “a cool way to remind people just how funny Chris was.” Oh, and it’s also a cool way for Spade to make bags of cash on the back of his deceased friend.
Still, Yahoo points out that this is far from the first time that dead people have been magically transformed into product pitchmen. This arguably isn’t even the most offensive instance of DirecTV resurrecting celebrities from the dead. That honor should probably go to Heather O’Rourke, the blonde little girl from Poltergeist who died tragically at age 12 about 20 years before popping up in a DirecTV ad with Craig T. Nelson. Unseemly? Yes. But if you’re going to win a cable war, you have to break a few eggs, we guess.