In a recording studio far, far away.
April 27, 2011
Here are a couple of lovely little ads for TomTom. They’ve been made to show that you can now get Star Wars voices for your sat nav system.
There’s a Darth Vader ad and also a Yoda version.
The dialogue is lovely and there are a lot of ‘in’ jokes for the Star Wars fan.
Having spent many, many hours in a recording studio trying to get the chosen voice to read things slightly differently I sympathise with the engineer who has to try and direct Vader.
There’s obviously an ‘in’ joke at TomTom over roundabouts. Both the Vader and Yoda ads have them referring to “roundabounds”.
Vader getting short-tempered and producing his lightsaber is a lovely touch. As is him trying a lighter version of his delivery and him humming the ‘Imperial March’ at the end.
See the Dark Lord recording his version here:
You can see the ending coming, but it’s still lovely.
And you can watch Yoda doing his stuff too.
Again, there are some lovely touches: the fact they can’t see him at the start (due to his lack of height), his jumbling up of the order of the words and him levitating the headphones in the booth.
And who wouldn’t love to be able to wave their hand nonchalantly and have all their problems disappear?
Their advertising may just have become more powerful than they can possibly imagine.
