My Reason to Watch the Olympics

As some of you are well aware, the Olympics in China are still going on, and if you’ve been following the news, you should be aware of the “fake” fireworks as well as the “lip-sync scandal” among other reasons to hate china.

Now if you’ve actually been watching said Olympics, perhaps with the intent to gape at Michael Phelps’ grandeur, you may have come across my favorite part of any major sporting event, the commercials. More importantly, this year, they’ve had an interesting turnout of animated commercials.

To start, I have to make mention of the cute Chinese mascots referred to as Fuwa [link]. I won’t get into it too much, but apparently a lot of thought went into these incredibly collectable care bear-like creatures. [link]

Now I’d like to point your attention to the latest batch of United Airlines’ animated commercials. [link] This time we have 5 unique commercials, each its own little point about United travel accompanied by “Rhapsody in Blue” as played by Herbie Hancock and Lang Lang. Note the short “Heart” which comes from the same people who did United’s “Dragon” commercial two years ago.

My last offering is “Journey to the East” [link] BBC sports enlisted the guys behind Gorillaz to do a retelling of the classic Chinese Epic, “Journey to the West” following the adventure of the Monkey King and his posse (Piggy and Sandy) to the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. Apparently BBC was doing a whole campaign involving the Monkey King in honor of the Chinese Olympics.