Ariston washing machine ad, featuring Robocop music. UK appliance company Ariston used the music from the Game Boy Robocop game, accompanied by a droning chant of “AND ON … AND ON … AND ON … AND ARISTON” to sell its wares. The combination of noisy chiptunes, looping dreamlike imagery, and rhythmic chanting is exactly how to put me in the mood to buy a washer. And by “buy a washer”, I mean “get really creeped out.”

Stuart Campbell wrote about a different surreal Ariston ad from the same campaign and featuring the same music:

“The ad ran for an extremely short time before being pulled (presumably for being too weird for prime-time ITV viewers), and your reporter was certain that he was the only person alive who’d ever (a) seen it, and (b) recognised the source of the music, and so the story would exist only in his fragile and decaying memory, soon to be rendered an unsubstantiated and implausible myth.”

You can read the full story, and see that ad in RealMedia format, on his site.

[Via Mathew Kumar]

tags / robocop / ariston / chiptunes / jc