Monday, October 03, 2005

Sony may be too used to playing games and has lost touch with reality

I thought I had seen stupidity in my time. I mean we just had two city council men fighting in the street over something that appeared in the local paper. Just when I think I have seen it all, just when I think that there is nothing out there that can shock me or give me a reality check as to how stupid we are as a people, I see something like this.

Apparently Sony had decided to celebrate the fact that they have been cranking out games and destroying our youth for 10 years with a 10 year anniversary ad. Nothing wrong with that, they should be proud that they have done so well. This ad was put out in Italy, why I don’t know; perhaps Italy was used as a guinea pig. I don’t know who the ad wizards were that came up with the concept, but methinks that they will have some trouble finding new jobs.

The ad has a young guy smiling and wearing a crown of thorns that are twisted into the geometric shapes that make up Playstation’s logo. The ad reads “Ten years of Passion.” Who thought this would fly? This is stupid. This would be stupid to release in the US, but the Sony ad wizards released this ad in Catholic country, Italy. Sony has pulled the ad and said that “spirit of the message was misunderstood.” What? I think most understood the message; it was the way the message was conveyed. If these idiots thought this was a great way to celebrate their anniversary I have to wonder about the leaders of this corporation.

I guess these nimrods did not realize that a smiling kid wearing a crown of thorns was going to cause a major problem. This is a Japanese corporation, so maybe the Japanese have no concept of what this ad would mean to Christians. That may not be a valid excuse any way you slice it because I believe that an American just recently took over the reigns at Sony, so it would be hard to blame the Japanese if an American were in charge.

I hope that someone will be raked over the coals for this. This is at best in very bad taste and at worst it is blasphemous and someone should have to take the bullet for this horrendously stupid campaign.

I saw this on Saturday night, when I got into work today, I saw something else that shocked me. A bookmaker took the Da Vinci work The Last Supper and made some changes.

Jesus and the Apostles are gambling at the table. Jesus has a stack of chips and Judas has thirty pieces of silver. To top everything off, this was an Irish bookmaker and they had BILLBOARDS up all over Ireland. If I remember correctly, Ireland is home to a few Catholics. This guy will be lucky if he isn’t killed.

What is going on with the world today? I know these days that the world is not exactly concerned with being a Christian world, but it never has been. I just don’t understand how anybody would think that a blasphemous ad would be taken in stride. I hate to think that these corporations and ad makers believe that we as a society are so jaded and cynical that we wouldn’t be angry at ads such as these that mock Christianity. As someone said in the Sony article, if this ad had concerned Islam this thing would have blown up, perhaps literally. I think it is time for the world to again respect Christianity as much as they respect (or more likely, fear) Islam.

2 comments:

Travis said...

Hadn't heard of this until now, but it doesn't shock me. Why not? Because Christianity is free to criticism and disrespect. Ask Bill Maher. He's the poster boy for anti-Christian remarks.
There's no way anything like this would feature Muhammed or Buddha. But when it's Christianity, we're supposed to say it's ok. It's not ok, it is blasphemous (easily) and no one should stand for it. Sony can backtrack all they want, but they owe Christians a HUGE apology.

BRATCH said...

Sony has never been at the forefront of logical thinking. Sure this was an advertisement, but Sony loves to make up stupid things.

Remember the BetaMax VCR. When everyone was using VHS, Sony created BetaMax.

When the iPod and other MP3 players became hot, Sony created their own and also created a new compression format for music that only worked with Sony music players. It fell by the way of the BetaMax since MP3's are the standard.

Currently Sony has created a new DVD format called Blu-Ray. These discs will be able to hold over 50 Gigabytes of information compared to the 4.7 GB of standard DVD discs.

Unfortunately for Sony, HP and Microsoft announced last week that they were going to support HD-DVD which will be a direct competitor to Blu-Ray DVD discs.

So none of this should surprise anyone the folks at Sony are delusional anyway. They believe that they are so big that they can create something different to compete with a product that already works fine.