Steve McQueen

Via Darren Barefoot, I discover that Ford has dragged out the corpse of Steve McQueen again to sell the (rather attractive) new Mustang.

This isn't the first time McQueen has been used by Ford of course - he was first used in Europe in 1997 to sell the Puma coupe in an advert based on "Bullitt". The funny thing about this being that in "Bullitt", what McQueen's character drove was a Mustang. Now, if they'd put him in the seat of a '97 Mustang, that really would have been an insult to his memory. At least the new one is, by all accounts, quite good (as was the Puma.)

I agree with Darren that this whole dead celebrity thing has the potential to be pretty ugly, but in this case it doesn't seem that the use of his image by Ford is really inconsistent with his life. And ultimately, how is this qualitatively different from - just by way of example - using a Nina Simone's voice in a commercial? She's dead, right? But no-one is going to bat an eyelid when they hear "My Baby Just Cares For Me" over an advert for daipers.

Comments

[Darren]

Thanks for that. McQueen's moving image is more problematic than, say, Simone's song for a few reasons:

* A moving image interacting with the world of the commercial is simply far more tangible and noteworthy than a background song. I mute commercials when watching TV, but I'd still see Mr. McQueen.

* McQueen is active in the commercial. Someone hands him the keys, he climbs in and drives off. He (or rather, his image) is unquestionably endorsing the product. A background song, I think, in our world of soundtracks, doesn't carry the same implication.

* Huh, just two reasons, really.

[Mark]

Those are reasonable points.

While I think I agree with you at a "gut feel" level that this is somehow qualitatively worse than my Nina Simone example (Nina Simone fans may disagree,) I also feel that we may have to just grin and bear it. Especially if we are also people who think that mash-ups are cool and that creative commons licenses will enable all sorts of funky creative repurposing of existing material if only more people would use them.

If we say that what Ford is doing - with the permission of all of the owners of rights to the images used - is wrong, while remixing news footage of Dick Cheney to have him say "fuck" a lot is a blow for freedom, then we are guilty of creating a double standard.

BTW, I don't think Hitler has an estate that might block reuse of his image, so I suspect there is some other reason why it hasn't been used in a commercial yet.

[Lou Holland]

Speaking of the new Ford Mustang commercial with Steve McQueen...It's been airing in the US since Oct. 2004 and is coming to Canada soon. I think it's the best commercial of all time. Steve McQueen, the image of the Mustang combined with the 'Field of Dreams' concept...awesome! I found the website for the Canadian actor, David Stuart, who is the living actor in the spot. He has a 1 minute copy of the commercial as well as spots for Kyocera, MSN, Greyhound, Excite.com and others. Again, it's www.david-stuart.net