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“Blake Griffin and Jack McBrayer Drop In to Say Thank You”Scene: A woman gets out of her car, stops and looks up, and there’s Blake Griffin in his red jumpsuit, tied to a black rope in the sky. What’s he doing there? Oh, just dropping by to say you have a cool car. The woman seems impressed, even happy. She thanks him for having taken the time to show up and tell her she has good taste, instead of, like, maybe getting out her mace? So we must assume that she, as we do, knows that Blake Griffin is cool and chill and didn’t come to do anything weird besides surprise you. It’s that nonthreatening aura the makes Blake Griffin a perfect car salesman; he’s large and curly enough to make you want to trust him, and he can dunk.
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"Punching Dummy"This one opens with the same mini-jingle of a bro singing “GRIF-FIN FOOOORCE!” in a way that reminds me of Mortal Kombat played by stuffed animals. It’s weird how I don’t often think about Blake Griffin’s last name being shared with a mythical creature that mixes a lion with an eagle. Out of the jump, we see an old bro going ham on a punching bag, viewed through binoculars by the 30 Rock dork again, like a guy spying on his own future, lame aging into older lame. Though this kind of lame has veracity, Kia insists. The old guy can still throw punches, wield his intent, if only against a plastic model, alone, and for no other reason than to stay fit to serve as purposeless superheroes charged with the task of reminding people who bought a Kia that Kia isn’t lame. Protect yourself from being an old guy who can’t still kick ass and fuck by investing now in a car green-lit by a premier athlete who so far each year of his life has upped his game.We see Blake lying back on the top bunk here, closer to heaven, only to find the mattress is fat and yellow and kind of oddly matches his hair in weird light. Here Blake offers actual information about the car, noting that the old fuck banging away at the mannequin isn’t as fast as the car, which has a 274-horsepower engine. Annoying White Guy scoffs at Blake, saying he already knew that.“That’s why you’re my bunkmate,” Griffin responds, halfway grunt-exhaling after another flourish of his delivery, allowing his line to carve its way into the head, creating another instance of what in repetition will be both the thing that irks me most about this fucking commercial and what I wait each time to hear. It’s the same instinct that makes me refuse to unfriend people on Facebook, because reading their annoying updates awakens something furious inside me, like a sort of mental S&M.Of course, Blake Griffin doesn’t care about any of that, which is what makes him kind of a hero in my mind, because once this shit is over he’ll appear there on the court playing his heart out, paid as fuck, probably never seeing the commercial ever again because when they come on, he’s at work. It’s the corporate employees who write this shit, and choose to funnel it back into the world over and over, who should be the punching bag.And of course, from all of this there’s no way out. Part of the TV experience is knowing how to tune out enough during the commercials so that you don’t end up putting a dent in your forehead. And before you know it, the crush is over, and the game is on again, and the rules are still the same. Because, after all, each game is just another iteration in its own system of repetition, variations on a series of possibilities, each as possible as the next, beautiful where ads are ugly. Each game ends, and the next begins. There is a winner and a loser. Some guys get paid while others sit at home and bitch. Eventually, we all end up asleep again, and we wake up and buy more shit and watch another game and ten dozen more ads and remember less and less of it the older we get until we can’t remember anything.Follow Blake on Twitter.
