Shaquille O'Neal has been a household name for nearly a quarter of a century—a fact that's hard to grasp sometimes. What is so much easier to grasp is his presence and staying power as a #brand, shilling everything from Burger King to Taco Bell to Good Burger, and more recently, from Gold Bond to Icy Hot. Shaq's career as a pitchman mostly involves picking up the scraps left over from a Michael Jordan or a LeBron James, and cashing in when the getting's good, with little regard to the product's quality or popularity. There is a reason why your local Macy's going out of business sale will feature deep discounts on Shaquille O'Neal menswear.Shaq's latest ad campaign continues this fine tradition of him finding diamonds in the rough, and doing what he can to make the ads he's in memorable, if still not very good. The General is a cut-rate car insurance company, now part of American Family Insurance, which deals in high-risk drivers, but you know it for the cheap CGI mascot and the wooden actors who appear with him on camera. As a purported once and future customer, and as the Louisiana-Pacific plyboard of celebrity endorsers, Shaquille O'Neal is an all-too perfect fit for The General, and the results are at once terrible and transcendent.There are only two commercials so far in the Shaq/General team-up, but they, in tandem with the extra footage The General has uploaded to YouTube, rival the infamous Erik Kratz/turkey bacon ads in their cheap production values and the creepy interactions between athlete and animated spokesperson. Ad #1 features Shaquille doing a, um, general pitch for the insurer, with the titular officer backstage, ready, willing and able to bounce a basketball off The Big Aristotle's head. There is an accompanying blooper reel for these ads in which no one knows the true meaning of bloopers, and so we get Shaq singing and joking about being able to fit into the prop convertible for about 39 seconds. Shaquille O'Neal has become self aware, or as self-aware as anyone willing to appear on an ad for The General can be; it is left to future historians to decide what this all means.Ad #2 is the stranger video of the two, featuring the duo sitting next to each other on the set, recalling Shaq's college days when he could only afford The General (or The Lieutenant Colonel, as it was presumably called at the time) for his car insurance. There is a scene in which Shaq says he trusted The General when he was younger, but it lingers where it almost looks as if O'Neal is supposed to be sipping his mug while the word "younger" is dubbed in and none of it works. Shaq then misinterprets how this insurance company has been helping customers for (just barely over) fifty years, by saying he doesn't look that old, and for 44 he doesn't look that bad at all. This was one of three commercials in constant rotation during a recent Golden Girls marathon on Logo, in which a current or future Basketball Hall Of Famer advertised something; needless to say, Shaq left a more lasting impression than LeBron James' support of the WNBA, or Jerry West's endorsement of Xarelto as his blood thinner of choice.For as long as Shaquille O'Neal lives (and probably long after that), we will get to enjoy the sheer bizarre quirkiness of his commercials. One would not be surprised if in the next twenty years or so we'll see Shaq shilling for reverse mortgages, and who is to say he has not earned the right to do so. As the memory of Shaq as one of the greatest big men of all-time evaporates, we still have the lovable, 7 foot-2 inch goof to celebrate, and as long as there are products to sell, then dammit, Shaquille O'Neal will be there to sell every last one of them.
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