All other Super Bowl commercials pale in comparison to this lawyer’s insurance-based space opera
A Kentucky lawyer goes all out (and into space) in his efforts to get your business
Aux Features Super Bowl
The giant corporations that dominate Super Bowl commercial airtime are, as we covered yesterday, increasingly interested in making absurd shit with the hopes that it might go viral as a result. For all their focus-tested, carefully planned design, though, they can never compete with the organically unhinged work of local businesses—like Kentucky lawyer Darryl Isaacs, who used the event to premiere an advertisement for his firm in which he dresses as a space man and smacks around a Darth Vader knock-off with a glowing war hammer.
Despite having a bigger budget than most of these kind of ads, Isaac’s spot belongs to the tradition of only mildly-vetted local business commercials that earnestly, awkwardly try to catch attention with simple gimmicks. (He also makes those, too.) After introducing us to the “galaxy of Kentucky,” which consists of a bunch of blocky CGI spaceships floating around in Earth’s orbit, the viewer is introduced to a woman who’s been in a “cruiser” accident and is about to be sucked into a giant craft labelled “BIG INSURANCE.” She calls for Darryl Isaacs, quoting Leia in Star Wars, and we’re introduced to our hero: Isaacs in a vinyl superhero suit, drifting through space in his bright red ship while listening to nondescript rock music.
Just as the woman is about to be forced to take a “small check” from a non-copyright infringing Vader figure, Isaacs busts into the enemy vessel to announce… “It’s hammer time!” and beat up some goons. A horse in an astronaut’s suit watches the fight from outside a window. The woman thanks Isaacs for defeating her opponents and he recites, “May justice always be with you,” smiling a frozen smile as the line escapes his lips.
Isaacs is no stranger to this kind of nonsense. In past years, he’s flown a dragon to fight off “big insurance zombies” in a Game Of Thrones riff and, in the best of them, become a mech-controlling superhero who yells “Kentucky justice!” as he flies into the air holding his signature, Thor-like hammer.
WDRB ran a segment on the ad, which explains some of the work that goes into Isaacs’ amateur filmmaking. The latest, Star Wars-themed commercial, apparently “took months to plan and four days to shoot with a stunt team in New Orleans.” Isaacs also told news that he always wants to one-up his past work, continuing to push the limits of insurance lawyer creativity while maintaining “reoccurring themes from years past, like a horse and… a big check.” The horse’s importance, we must note, comes from Isaacs shooting a past commercial in a barn where “there was a horse he liked to feed.”
If you want more background on this hilariously involved production, watch the master at work in a behind-the-scenes video posted alongside the ad.
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19 Comments
I work with trial attorneys and I’ve never understood this predisposition towards seeming like ultra-tough hammer-wielding brawlers. As if being in a courtroom litigating the finer points of insurance coverage and payout is like Thunderdome. They do really good work making sure insurance companies pay what people are actually owed (because you know they will stiff them as much as possible) but it’s just such a weird trope among them.
That was certainly…something. Was that a horse? LOL
This website’s Super Bowl commercial coverage is fucking pitiful.To be clear: the fact that it exists.
Well, someone has to Stick to Sports™ around here.
I got nothing. Glad this guy is having fun.
I used to work at WDRB (mentioned in the article) and I interviewed Isaacs a couple times. He’s a really unassuming, nice guy in person.
Sometimes that’s the best you can get: harmless fun that no one else understands.
Truly. I hate the tone of this article; the guy is having fun being weird. That should be celebrated, not dunked upon.
i enjoyed the dissonance of the country music & the sci fi visuals.
On a related note, I read this article this morning:https://www.adweek.com/creativity/heres-what-happened-inside-tides-super-bowl-laundrylater-war-room/
And this was my reaction:
Sometimes I shake my head and wonder how the hell I ended up in this particular version of reality.
‘Team Tide doesn’t like this, but it’s too late now. Can’t delete it and lose all the building momentum, they agree. That tweet, with the wrong Emily, remains Tide’s pinned tweet throughout the night.’Wow. You’ve got a high-paying stupid job, and you can’t even do the one stupid thing you needed to do without screwing it up. MOMENTUM!!!!…?
Sidebar: Bill Murray also is spending time in Kentucky, as his son is an assistant coach on the Louisville Cardinals men’s basketball team.
“She raises her glass and ends with, ‘Cheers now, and laundry later!’” ughhhhh
I shouldn’t be shocked that AdWeek doesn’t like my ad blocker, but hey, there it is. Also, I lived this hell for years trying to identify activations and social media bullshit, and it’s all just the age-old game of making up new metrics so it looks like your whole industry isn’t built on a house of cards over a volcano. Pro tip: They really don’t like it when you call that out.
I’ll watch this later, but it’s going to have to blow me away to top the Texas Law Hawk.
Are all local tv lawyers “The [Insert State] Hammer!”?
Planet Kentucky, Its amazing that an entire planetary population somehow manages to share one set of genetic grandparents
That was better than it had any right to be.
Also, I guess that’s one Kentucky lawyer that’s doing alright.
This takes the whole “age of casual magic” to a, uh, interesting degree, to say the least.