AC/DC once started a song by saying, “she was a fast machine; she kept her motor clean.” “You Shook Me All Night Long” must have made it into thousands of commercials just because of that, but we doubt that this song ever found one that could fit it better than this Dodge Viper ad from 2009.
We found it on the YouTube channel of the man who directed the commercial, Paul Boyd. If the video itself was not explicit enough about what happens, its title is lap dance. Don’t worry: it is safe for work, and it is funny if you still have a sense of humor in times when anything and everything can offend someone. Thankfully, this film was shot when very few people were engaged in problematizing stuff, which is the only reason we still have it around. Ironically, the Dodge Viper isn’t – in production lines, we mean. You may still find quite a few driving, but most will soon become car collection material.
The commercial starts with a typical yuppie sitting in a lonely chair in the middle of nowhere. The location looks like a dam, but we did not manage to identify where it is. If you happen to know where it is, let us know in the comments. The fact is that the businessman is there, waiting among those large concrete surfaces when a black (or dark blue) Viper shows up and throws its rear end sideways. Watching it arrive from under the man’s chair, between his legs, is a great joke with the cliche of lap dance scenes. The yuppie rejoices before the show starts.
If you think about what a lap dance is, it is a good thing that the Viper did not come close to the yuppie at any time. Someone in the comments joked that the yuppie actor must have run for his life a few times during the shooting. If he did, we must praise his acting skills: he seems pretty at ease there. The Viper driver was certainly a talented person, able to get close enough to simulate the real deal. The sports car swings in front of the young man and goes around him in every (safe) possible way.
When the show apparently ends, the yuppie puts a 20-dollar bill under the windshield wiper and asks: “Can we… can we do that again?” Nowadays, that kind of money would probably be considered a cheap tip, but that’s on inflation – another sign of how things change. The Dodge Viper seems happy with it and generates more rubber dust on the concrete while the yuppie observes it in ecstasy.
The commercial ends with the brand’s slogan at the time: “Grab life by the horns.” It was later reduced to only “Grab life.” Nowadays, Dodge adopts four others: “Born Dodge,” “Domestic, not domesticated,” “Excess drives success,” and “Never Neutral.”
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