Two pigs enjoy ham for dinner, a woman’s overgrown armpit hair flies in the face of a man riding behind her on a bicycle built for two, and a coroner drops his breakfast burrito into a cadaver during an autopsy–then picks it right back up and takes a big bite out of it. These are some of the bizarrely funny situations portrayed in Boost Mobile’s “Unwronged”-themed campaign out of Santa Monica’s 180LA, and “Pet Carrier,” the latest :30 in the campaign, adds yet another delightfully insane scenario to the mix.
Directed by The Perlorian Brothers, who are represented by Furlined, and edited by Steve Gandolfi of Cut + Run, “Pet Carrier” finds a woman checking in for a flight at the airport, bending down to look in on her young son, who is dressed as a dog and sitting inside a pet carrier. He seems perfectly fine in the cramped space, noting that he has a coloring book to keep him busy.
Addressing the camera, the mother, who looks incredibly uncomfortable, asks, “Do you think this is wrong?”
“Pets fly cheap,” she says, trying to defend her decision to jam her kid into a pet carrier, “and we could use the money we save to put towards our cell phone payments.”
Two airline employees, neither of whom notices that her “dog” is actually a little boy, step into the picture to tell the harried mom about the benefits of Boost Mobile’s pre-paid cell phone service. “It’s only fifty bucks for unlimited talk, text and web on a dependable nationwide network,” a baggage handler says, holding his Sanyo Incognito (Boost Mobile’s first-ever QWERTY clamshell phone) up for her to see.
“Is that the talking dog?” the other guy asks as he loads the pet carrier onto a cargo ramp.
“Pet Carrier” is one of three spots–the others are “Lawyer” and “Medical Testing”–directed by The Perlorian Brothers for the “Unwronged” campaign. As for why they were drawn to the assignment, “We liked the idea of the unwronged. It felt like a really fun and subversive area to explore,” said Michael Gelfand, who along with Ian Letts, comprises The Perlorian Brothers.
The Perlorian Brothers had an interesting approach in that they wanted to bring a sense of realism to “Pet Carrier,” according to 180LA creative director Gavin Milner. “They felt that the wrongs would feel that much more egregious if the situation felt that much more honest, which we thought was a really wonderful take on things,” Milner remarked.
Comedy with humanity Alexandra Hoover, who plays the mother in the spot, delivers the sincere, genuine performance that really makes the spot work. “She needed to have a little bit of weariness and sad, tired eyes so that she was seen as a little bit sympathetic,” Letts said, noting, “It’s quite a cruel thing she’s doing, right? So we needed to feel that there was some humanity there. That’s always the way with comedy spots, I think. The characters need to have some sympathetic quality.”
It was also important to the directors as well as the agency to create an original cast of characters, so a lot of “real people” were brought in to audition for the spot. “That meant sitting through horrible, horrible casting calls,” Milner recalled with a laugh. “But we found some gems in there, and the beauty of it is these guys probably aren’t going to end up in another TV spot on the air at the same time. It feels like we have our own world of characters.”
Child’s play
Taylor Cosgrove, whom The Perlorian Brothers believe to be about seven years old, was cast as the “dog.” “We went around and around on his age quite a bit. We needed to have a kid of a certain age in order to make this not feel particularly wrong,” Milner shared.
A baby would have been particularly wrong, right?
“Yeah, exactly,” Milner said. “The kid had to be a little person in his own right and sort of okay with the whole thing. We also didn’t want him to be too big physically because that would have been strange, so we found this kid who was pretty small, and he had a very sweet face, and he and the mom worked together really well.”
The kid really did sit in the pet carrier, by the way.
“Thankfully, for him, he nailed it in a couple of takes,” Milner added.
Asked why the child is dressed as a dog and not a cat (cats also fly the friendly skies, you know), Milner explained, “That’s a good question. To my mind there was never any doubt it was going to be a dog. When the writer first riffed the spot to us, it was a dog, and it just so happens that the punch line to one of my all time favorites jokes is, ‘Look, it’s a talking dog.’ “
Letts quipped: “They’ve done research about cell phone users and dog people, and there was a correlation.”
That’s not true.
What is true, according to Milner, is that while Boost Mobile once targeted a younger demographic, “Pet Carrier” and the other new commercials are aimed at a broader audience. “We’ve tried to age it up little by little as they introduce better and nicer phones targeting a different crowd, moms and families,” Milner said, adding, “Given that the world’s broke, we’re finding all of a sudden that the pre-paid arena has really exploded.”
