So what do you get when you take Dragon Ball and body wash and combine them? Something like this commercial would be the best guess. It’s absolutely crazy really and the only thing similar that comes to mind is a moment in Dumb and Dumber when Lloyd snocks a huge amount of phlegm at an enemy in a dream sequence. Otherwise disarming ones opponent in a scathing rebuke of body wash and suds seems like something that you might think up during a serious acid trip or after eating ‘special’ baked goods. Yes, the pun was totally intended, as it might explain how this commercial came to be.
You’ve got to hand it to the Japanese when it comes to their commercials, they’ve found ways to make them entirely entertaining but so far out of left field for the rest of the world that we sometimes collectively say ‘huh?’. That’s not to say the commercial isn’t good, it’s simply that in America at least this kind of commercial might receive a lot of frowns and religious nuts trying to ban it for indecency. I mean come on, he did blast the guy’s clothes off with his vicious suds attack. But to anyone else that might seem comical and carry a very poignant point that this body wash is serious enough that it doesn’t just cleanse the body, it straight up knocks the dirt off of the person it’s applied to. If this kind of thing did what it looked like in the commercial you can imagine that the US military would be taking out stock in it and sending it to the soldiers on the front lines to use when engaging the enemy. Think about it, just throwing suds at a person and leaving them defenseless, it’d be a surefire win for many people, at least until the enemy started using shower curtains.
The creativity in the commercial is hard to get away from and it’s kind of obvious the budget had to be kind of spendy for this short amount of time, but if it sells the product then it was worth it. There are plenty of studies out there that show a positive correlation between the commercials that use special effects to get to the viewer and the sales of the product that they’re using that tell just how effective this approach can be. It’s amazing really that people will buy anything just because of an awesome commercial, but it seems like a few of us might have fallen under that same sway throughout the years, simply because it’s a natural occurrence and it is possible to see how such a commercial could make any product look good. Heck, they even made a plain bucket of water seem like it could be used as a viable weapon.
So yes it’s a little out there and yeah, it definitely plays up a very mundane product in a way that seems kind of ridiculous. But can you possibly see Goku or Gohan flinging suds at someone and knocking them out? It’d be a Dragon Ball episode for the ages.
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