In the Summer of 1968, I was about to turn ten years old, and on TV there was a cool though mysterious British TV show on in place of summer reruns. It was called The Prisoner, and I really enjoyed the show. If you don't immediately recognize the show, try to remember a weird tv show about a spy who was held prisoner in a village with weird architecture who was continually trying to escape, and often pursued by a big balloon-shaped thing (the balloon is what most non-fans recognize--That even made it into a show parody on The Simpsons). When I got older, I remained a fan of the series, which had a lot of emphasis on freedom and individuality, and remains a cult classic. I even paid a pretty penny to get all 17 episodes on DVD!
The show is being remade in a modern version that will be shown on American Movie Classics (AMC) this Fall. To prepare the way, IFC is showing the episodes of the old show. They ran three back-to-back last night, and I watched them. To my surprise, I saw the Creepy Lady who is the subject of so much scorn here....I haven't seen a lot of these ads, but they were as we've discussed before, the lady acting very sedated and disturbed. Palm is sponsoring the show and using it to promote the Pre. IFC is mostly ad-free, but the Pre gets a short ad at the beginning of each show. I was happy to note that each ad did highlight something unique you can do with the Pre that most phones don't have. But I wish they'd focused even more on what you can do with it, rather than on the Creepy Lady!
Hopefully Palm didn't pay too much for this, since they only get a short ad before each program. But the sponsorship may may be quite a benefit, since people watching The Prisoner are likely to perceive themselves as independent people who don't follow the crowd, and I believe the Pre is targeting this market (obviously all of us here are much better than the sheep using iPhones and BlackBerries, right?
). I suspect many of the hardcore fans are my age (50) or over, which may expose the Pre to a user group that isn't as likely to hang out on tech-heavy sites like this one, or to swoon over details of the latest smart phone release. I hope it works for Pre, and I hope The Prisoner is a success!
"The Prisoner" and the Creepy Lady
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