The St. Louis Rams weren’t the only winners at this year’s Super Bowl. Super Sunday also had the annual multimillion dollar advertising extravaganza that featured dancing monkeys, speeding cheetahs and a herd of housecats-as well as footage from a 60-year-old movie classic. FedEx’s "Oz," which was directed by Joe Pytka of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA via BBDO New York, placed in the top 10 of USA Today’s annual Super Bowl Ad Meter survey.
The spot, produced by Hyatt Choate, an executive producer at BBDO New York, is a clever, digitally composited piece that goes to great lengths to show that Federal Express will deliver to just about anywhere-even to the Yellow Brick Road. "Oz" opens as The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy meets the Lollypop Guild in Munchkinland. As three Munchkin men sing her a high-pitched song of welcome, their voices begin to deepen. A FedEx truck then literally descends on the scene, crushing the Wicked Witch of the West. The urgent delivery consists of three helium balloons. The Munchkins grab the balloons and inhale the helium, which restores their voices to "normal." (The ad has since been pulled due to concerns of some advocacy groups about the practice of children inhaling dangerous chemicals to get high.)
Choate was excited about the idea from the moment it landed on his desk. "I don’t know anybody who hasn’t seen The Wizard of Oz at some point in their lives," he explains. "It was something that could touch so many people so easily. It’s a great vehicle."
To introduce the concept to the client and to Pytka, Choate used his editing skills to create a sample "Oz." "I took [The Wizard of Oz] and cut a sixty-second spot of it on the Avid, just to see how it would work to time," he relates. "We didn’t have anything else but the movie, a couple of drawings and a little FedEx truck that I’d shot on a greenscreen. So I stuck the truck in, and went from the movie to the drawings and back again. It gave you an idea of how the spot would work. And everyone who looked at it probably got the feeling of how big this commercial could be."
