Stone the crows, are they fair dinkum about this flamin' ad?

[Gob]

WHAT the bloody hell were they thinking? Tourism Australia's latest advertisement for the global market, if you'll listen to its critics, casts us as a nation of tone-deaf bogans caught in a '70s time-warp in which kangaroos get around in herds rather than mobs.

''How cringeworthily embarrassing,'' sneers one post on the media website Mumbrella. ''Bogan pride at its best,'' writes another. ''I'm embarrassed to be Australian,'' says another. ''When will we shake these dowdy, 50-year-old stereotypes?''



Launched yesterday, the 90-second ad features everyday Aussies singing (slightly off-key) There's Nothing like Australia as it scans the staple icons of Uluru, the Barrier Reef and the Opera House, on to the 12 Apostles and beyond, while they list all the things in this great brown land that there is nothing like: sunset from a camel, this billabong, this duck-billed mammal. ''There's nothing like this bear'', sings a woman holding a koala. ''That's not a bear,'' she is corrected. ''There's nothing like these furry things that bounce around in herds,'' a child sings. She refers to kangaroos, not hyperactive cattle.
Surf's up ... an image from Tourism Australia's new campaign.

Surf's up ... an image from Tourism Australia's new campaign.

And ''There's nothing like the people here, where everyone's your mate,'' sing drinkers in a pub.

If you listen to the ad's makers, DDB Sydney, and the odd expert observer, it was not made for inner-bloody-city Sydney intellectuals who cringe at cultural stereotypes. It was made for a huge bloody international audience that likes kangaroos and koalas and easy-going Australians. And it does not once resort to that word, bloody, unlike the Lara Bingle campaign - ''where the bloody hell are you?'' - which Kevin Rudd called a ''rolled-gold disaster''.

The cultural historian Tony Moore, author of The Barry McKenzie Movies, reckons the new ad is better and - while it does play on stereotypes and harks back to the appeal of the Paul Hogan ads - he says: ''I think it probably will work.'' Dr Moore, director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, adds: ''[It] seeks to plug into the Australian reputation for irreverence, established in films we have exported internationally over the decades, such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie or Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.''

Matt Eastwood, the national creative director of DDB Australia, says it does not portray bogans but ''authentic'' Australians giving a warm welcome to international travellers.

He says Lorina Gore, from the Opera Australia company, is about its only professional singer. She leads its chorus for a very in-tune finale.

The ad was directed by Michael Gracey, behind YouTube's most-watched commercial, the Evian Roller Babies. The music is by the producer Josh Abrahams.

http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-new ... utostart=1

[Gob]

Whoopsy!

You don't need Mickey Mouse ears to hear the similarities.

Tourism Australia's latest ad jingle is close enough to Disney's Mickey Mouse Club theme tune that it could struggle to defend a legal challenge, a music expert says.

In the wake of the Federal Court's ruling in February that Men At Work pay for ripping off parts of their pub classic Down Under from Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree, Queensland Conservatorium of Music popular music program convenor Donna Weston said the chord progression in Tourism Australia's jingle was about "80 per cent the same" as the Mickey Mouse theme song.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/travel/ ... utostart=1

[loCAtek]

ROLF!

[Beer Sponge]

or ROFL?

[Daisy]

No! Rolf, Australia's greatest export

[Gob]

Rolf's ultimate "reinterpretation"..


All together now!