The giant corporations that dominate Super Bowl commercial airtime are, as we covered yesterday, increasingly interested in making absurd shit with the hopes that it might go viral as a result. For all their focus-tested, carefully planned design, though, they can never compete with the organically unhinged work of local businesses—like Kentucky lawyer Darryl Isaacs, who used the event to premiere an advertisement for his firm in which he dresses as a space man and smacks around a Darth Vader knock-off with a glowing war hammer.
Despite having a bigger budget than most of these kind of ads, Isaac’s spot belongs to the tradition of only mildly-vetted local business commercials that earnestly, awkwardly try to catch attention with simple gimmicks. (He also makes those, too.) After introducing us to the “galaxy of Kentucky,” which consists of a bunch of blocky CGI spaceships floating around in Earth’s orbit, the viewer is introduced to a woman who’s been in a “cruiser” accident and is about to be sucked into a giant craft labelled “BIG INSURANCE.” She calls for Darryl Isaacs, quoting Leia in Star Wars, and we’re introduced to our hero: Isaacs in a vinyl superhero suit, drifting through space in his bright red ship while listening to nondescript rock music.
Just as the woman is about to be forced to take a “small check” from a non-copyright infringing Vader figure, Isaacs busts into the enemy vessel to announce... “It’s hammer time!” and beat up some goons. A horse in an astronaut’s suit watches the fight from outside a window. The woman thanks Isaacs for defeating her opponents and he recites, “May justice always be with you,” smiling a frozen smile as the line escapes his lips.
Isaacs is no stranger to this kind of nonsense. In past years, he’s flown a dragon to fight off “big insurance zombies” in a Game Of Thrones riff and, in the best of them, become a mech-controlling superhero who yells “Kentucky justice!” as he flies into the air holding his signature, Thor-like hammer.
WDRB ran a segment on the ad, which explains some of the work that goes into Isaacs’ amateur filmmaking. The latest, Star Wars-themed commercial, apparently “took months to plan and four days to shoot with a stunt team in New Orleans.” Isaacs also told news that he always wants to one-up his past work, continuing to push the limits of insurance lawyer creativity while maintaining “reoccurring themes from years past, like a horse and... a big check.” The horse’s importance, we must note, comes from Isaacs shooting a past commercial in a barn where “there was a horse he liked to feed.”
If you want more background on this hilariously involved production, watch the master at work in a behind-the-scenes video posted alongside the ad.
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