One of my favorite TV commercials using animals is the K9 Advantix commercials with the little singing puppy. There’s one where he’s written to thank his parents for the package with the K9 Advantix in it. (Which stopped all the biting, because those “fleas, ticks, mosquitoes really bother.”) In fact, the commercial is titled “Camp” and you can watch it on the K9 Advantix site.)
They have a new commercial with the little pup singing another song:
There ain’t no bugs on me
There ain’t no bugs on me.
There may be bugs on some of you mugs,
But there ain’t no bugs on me.
I wanted to find out about the life and times of the little lab featured in the commercials, but I couldn’t find much. All I did turn up was I believe her name is Holly and she’s a lab (which I’d already discerned).
However, I did learn some other interesting things about the other Advantage commercials and the animals used in them. (Other commercials include the one with the cat in the wet suit to keep fleas off, and the beagle in the suit of armor waiting at the curb with his owner and an Airedale is looking at him funny.)
• Most of the dogs and cats in the Advantage/Advantix ads are not even real! They’re computer generated by Rhythm and Hues, a special effects company. (They’ve created animals for such movies as: Garfield, Chronicles of Narnia, and Cats and Dogs.)
• The lab puppy is a real dog, and so is the Airedale in the “suit of armor” commercial.
• The costumes (space suit, western gear, suit of armor, and wet suit) were made by a modeler and “fitted” around either molds (cat in wet suit) or stuffed toy dogs (dogs in space suit and suit of armor).
• For the print ads, real animals were photographed and their faces later imposed on the computer generated animals in costume.
• The little puppy is not really singing. (Yes, I knew that couldn’t be the case, but I wondered how they did it.) Again, the magic of computers and something called an “animation program.”
I didn’t learn exactly what I set out to learn, but I ended up with some interesting tidbits anyway.
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