Trimspa, Baby

Couldn't resist posting this picture, found over at Immoderation. If you're not yet clicking on that link and visiting Immoderation, you're a bigger fool than I thought. Funny, funny, rather brilliant stuff, nothing at all like the semi-coherent allusion-heavy rants you'll find here. And she knows how to use Photoshop!



This is Anna Nicole, um, enjoying herself during the Trimspa-sponsored party at the Passions Nightclub of Hollywood, Florida.

This picture is amazing. Not because Anna Nicole is obviously doped out of her gourd. Everyone knows Anna Nicole Smith is a drug addict. But because a company selling a product they want you to ingest daily thinks that this will be good marketing. So this supposed health product has chosen, as their public face, a burnout ex-stripper who looks as if she's spent the last 24 hours with a plastic bag over her head, huffing gasoline fumes in an apartment being fumigated for cockroaches.

The photo reminds me of that ad for Trimspa Anna Nicole did about a year ago. It ran all the time during "Howard Stern" re-runs on E!. You may remember the ad yourself, as it's the only ad running during that show not endorsing "Girls Gone Wild."

In the ad, Anna's newly-thin and we're getting a look at her fast-paced hip Hollywood lifestyle. She's driving fast cars, attending premieres, that sort of thing. During the commercial, she keeps offering you, the viewer, fabulous prizes. "Want a million dollars?" for example. Or "want a Humvee?"

I should note that Anna and the commercial rhetorically assume that the viewer's answer to all the questions will be "yes." However, the trouble one would encounter attempting to regularly park a Humvee on the streets of Palms and Culver City, California, would far far outweigh any potential status one would achieve by driving around an expensive modified former military vehicle. I would take this into account if, in real life, through some odd twist of fate, a former Playboy Playmate offered me a free Humvee.

[I was going to make a lame Humvee-Hummer-Playmate joke right there, but decided against it. Now I think that may have been a mistake, as it's a rather good set-up for such a joke. But alas, the moment has passed.]

Back to the commercial. In the end, Ms. Smith is dressed in some manner of skimpy outfit. She looks into the camera with bedroom eyes and asks "Like my body?"

Once again, the assumed answer is "of course!" And the commercial proceeds to inform you how, for the low low price of whatever the fuck Trimspa costs, you too can have an amazing body like Anna's.

Regrettably for Trimspa, the desired sensual effect doesn't really come through. Even though Anna's body does in fact look much better than the bloated form she featured on E's own "Anna Nicole Smith Show," she seems very disoriented during the commercial, so the result is not so much "sexiness" as, um, well, "pity."

When Anna leans into the camera and mewls "like my body," the effect is subtly terrifying, like that scene in The Shining when Jack starts making out with the hot ghost chick in the bathroom, only to discover she's really a rotting corpse.

Wow, reading over this description, the commercial sounds fairly tragic. When my roommate Chris and I first saw it, our immediate response was to laugh. Hysterically. And then to rewind the thing on the DVR to watch it a few more times. I suppose we're just cruel by nature.