Louie the Fly is approximately 588 times the age of an average house fly. This is perhaps strange since he is the mascot of a fly spray.
Indeed, it seems Mortein not only fails in killing the bad-guy fly (he has a gangster hat and smokes a cigar!) but gives him some freakishly prolonged life – if he doesn’t escape the spray by flying away and then reaching back for his hat, he somehow has risen from the grave by the next ad. The Mortein website http://www.mortein.com.au/mortein_frameset.html recognises this flaw, but makes the odd point that “This might explain some of his continued success: in a sense, the consumer is not involved in killing, and yet at the same time can see that Mortein is effective in removing the ‘mighty unclean’ Louie.” This is highly contradictory and reminds me of George Orwell’s doublethink concept from 1984 – that you can hold two contradictory opinions of something. The consumer will still be involved with killing, just because ‘effective’ replaces ‘deadly’, and ‘removing’ does ‘killing’. And because something is ‘mighty unclean’ (ah, grammar. You can even download the song from the website if you want), does it mean we have to kill it? Mind you, I’m not up for giving a fly a bath.
2 Comments
The chemicals used in bug spray are toxic. They’re designed to kill insects. I reckon I’d rather the fly then spraying toxic chemicals through my house…
Fly swatters and shoes were invented for a reason, I think they are more effective too!