(Yeah, you bet your ass fictionalization! Via Arthurdent.)
If you’ve been watching any Spike TV program lately — be it a Bellator event, a Bar Rescue marathon, or an episode of Auction Hunters (if you’re some kind of masochist) — chances are you’ve caught at least one of Chuck Liddell‘s promo spots for Duralast. Even though he’s been removed from the game some four years now, Liddell remains a more marketable MMA personality than say, Renan Barao (sorry Dana), which makes him the perfect guy to hawk car batteries and brakes. You know, tough guy stuff.
The Iceman being The Iceman, Liddell’s ads have featured the typical mix of stilted line delivery and goofball insanity that we have come to expect of Ol’ Chucky boy. The problem is, some of them take major liberties in regards to the quality of Duralast products, while others are unrealistic to the point of false advertising. Lucky for you, we’re here to clear everything up. Let’s get started.
“Walk the Walk”
First of all, I highly doubt that simply holding a Duralast battery grants one the power necessary to walk through concrete walls. That is not how automotive batteries work. They must first be attached to a power source before they can generate any kind of voltage. In fact, given that the average battery weighs around 40 pounds, I posit that carrying a car battery would only diminish one’s chances of walking through a wall, in that it would severely weaken the carrier, especially in the adverse desert conditions that Liddell appears to be traversing through.
Now, onto the rhino. Rhinos do not live in deserts. They are grazers who seek out savannahs and areas of densely-vegetated, palatable grasses as their habitats. Additionally, white rhinos like the one featured in this ad are pack travelers, but even if this particular rhino were to be separated from its clan and wander into a desert, it would still be impossible to lift said rhino, even in its weakened state, with one hand while carrying a car battery in the other.
Finally, there is no known military vehicle on the market that shoots a blast of ice like Sub-Zero. Even if this technology were developed, it would make (sub) zero sense to place it in the desert, where it would be rendered virtually useless. And contrary to the theory that Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull put forth, no human can survive a nuclear blast simply by being a badass. Moving on…
“Stopping Power”
Even granting Mr. Liddell the ability to stop a charging bull with a brake pad, there is no conceivable way in which he could stop a wrecking ball with his head. The force required to crush a human skull is between 16 and 196 psi. A wrecking ball is made of solid steel, weighs anywhere between 1,000 and 7,000 kilograms, and can swing at speeds of up to 4 ft/s. If the logic in this ad were to hold up, it would mean that Rich Franklin essentially possesses Superman-level strength in his right hand, and we all know that Superman is a fictional character created by DC comics to capture the imagination of pre-teens and grown men who never learned what books are.
And as for that preposterous mid-air stop, just no. Callahan brake pads, long considered to be the finest brake pads ever built, grant a vehicle traveling 55 mph a stopping distance of 16 metres (as demonstrated by auto tycoon Tommy Callahan here). To propose that a vehicle’s brakes could be powerful enough to stop said vehicle — free falling at an average velocity of 9.8 m/s² — in mid-air is simply ludicrous. This is not the Looney Tunes. These are real f*cking people’s lives we’re talking about here.
Tough of Legend — Yeti
I don’t mean to poke holes in your little story, Chuck, but how exactly did these two friends manage to turn a car battery into some sort of impromptu defibrillator? Did one of them happen to be MacGyver? And why the hell were they carrying a Duralast battery through the woods in the first place? And if the story is, by your own admission, possibly fabricated, how does that prove the toughness of Duralast batteries? If anything, it proves that the people behind this Duralast marketing campaign are nothing more than snake oil salesman praying on our common fear of the unknown to push their own personal agenda and profit from it. Thanks, but not in my America!
Tough of Legend — Marriage
I may not be married, but I highly doubt that a simple breach of latrine etiquette by itself could be enough to break up a marriage. Clearly, something else was going on there. Was this husband a habitual line-stepper when it came to the toilet seat? The wife a bipolar schizophrenic prone to overreacting and making rash decisions at the drop of a hat? I want answers, Mr. Liddell, and you’re simply not providing them with your anecdotal tales of Duralast products. Stopping a train by attaching brake pads to one’s feet? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE WITH THAT NOISE.
Will it Crush? Duralast vs. Dental Hygiene
Alright, Duralast marketing people, I’ve had just about enough of this. If you want to market your product by capturing the niche market of crush-porn fetishists, that’s fine. But don’t you dare try and tell me that a car battery’s ability to crush a bottle of toothpaste, or a dozen eggs, or a porcelain elephant, or fun (FUN!) somehow equates to the superiority of your product.
As previously mentioned, the average car battery weighs around 40 pounds regardless of its make or model, so to boldly declare that your battery is somehow better than a Kirkland Signature or EverStart based simply on its ability to do something your competitors believed to be common knowledge is not only moronic, but misleading, bamboozling, and downright deplorable. Everyone in this room is now dumber for have witnessed your cheap attempts at exploitation through bloated and egocentric false marketing. I award you zero points, and may God have mercy on your soul.