The Smarmy Carny

Thanks to the success of MXC and then Wipeout, we're seeing a rash of Japanese game imports coming to the U.S.

I'm not sure about the rules exactly, but it really does seem straightfoward. The contestant stands at the end of a runway in front of a pit of water. A large wall with a certain shape comes toward them, and the contestant has to contort their body into the shape of the hole so they remain in the playing area instead of being swept into the water. Some holes/shapes require laying down, jumping, and teamwork.

Fox's casting call earlier this summer requested same-sex teams of three players, which seems to have been the format for the original show as well.

Of course, reading about the show tends to be fairly boring, while watching these people play the game is much more enjoyable:

Now go ahead . . . start filling out that application. You know you want to try it yourself!

A car salesman congratulates a man on how much he already knew about the car. The man admits that he used cars.com's consumer reviews and dealer locator to help himself instead of using Plan B.

The car salesman asks what Plan B was, and the man explains that he was going to have a witch doctor shrink the salesman's head. He points out into the waiting room, where a witch doctor is sitting next to the other customers.

At that point, another worker, Jorge, comes into the office with a shrunken head and asks to have the rest of the day off because he has a tiny head. Sure enough, the witch doctor has started early. The customer admits that he should probably get the witch doctor out of the dealership.

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Easter egg: The salesman's name tag reads "Jason Karley." Jason Karley is a copywriter for DDB, Chicago, the agency responsible for this commercial.

Set to Habanera from Bizet's opera Carmen, a man arrives in his apartment, opens a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, and puts a small corner of a Dorito on a mouse trap.

After placing the mousetrap in front of a small mouse hole, he pulls up a chair and waits.

As soon as the man puts his hand in the Doritos bag and pulls out some chips, a huge man-sized mouse breaks through the wall and tackles the man, throwing him backward in his chair. The mouse is clearly a man in a bad mouse suit, but it seems to be intended that we suspend our disbelief and think of him as an actual huge mouse.

After the Doritos logo flashes, we see the mouse straddling the man, punching him in the head.

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This commercial was created by Billy Federighi in Doritos' Snack Strong Productions contest.

A homely woman with a unibrow, large mole, big teeth, hair clips, and frumpy fashion sense is fawned over by countless men as Frankie Valli's Can't Take My Eyes off of You plays in the background.

A tall, handsome man in an elevator gives her a look. Another admirer walks through a glass door as he ogles her walking out of her building. A coffee shop employee is engulfed in smoke as he is entranced by the woman and forgets what he's doing. Every man on the bus sits as closely to her as they can while a bicyclist pedals alongside the bus until he crashes into the back of a taxi.

Finally, we see the woman freshening up: After she has made herself ready, she opens a can of Planters cashews and rubs a cashew on her neck, wrist, and chest instead of using a perfume.

Planters — the all-natural aphrodisiac.

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An unsuspecting man is pushed into a car containing sleeping badgers that, "if awakened, they'd gnaw his face off. "

The people who pushed him into the car begin to fire cannons off outside the car, but nothing can be heard inside the car: Lucky for him, that car is the Toyota Corolla, which keeps the interior silent from outside noise.

As the man breathes a sigh of relief, his cell phone goes off, awakening the badger. The badger growls in the man's face, and we then move to the car's exterior.

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Toyota's slogan? "Live the dream for less coin."

A man shopping for a car explains to the car salesman that he did all his research on his cell phone with cars.com. He said it was that, or "Plan B".

The salesman asked what Plan B was, and the guy explains, "Oh, I was gonna have you fight Glondor in a stone circle death match."

We then see Glondor, a tattooed hulk of a man, pressing his fists into shards of glass and stepping into a fiery stone circle with the car salesman.

Glondor sounds a barbaric yawp, and the guy strongly suggests to the salesman that he should step out of the circle "to avoid any confusion."

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An office worker impresses his boss by showing him how he was shipping all the company's packages via carrier pigeons equipped with GPS tracking and night vision sensors.

For the large packages, however, he used giant pigeons and robes that almost immediately broke and dropped the packages right into the street, crushing cars. The pigeons then landed, pecking bread from a bread truck, drinking from broken fire hydrants, and causing accidents with feathers.

The boss immediately mandates that they will switch to FedEx.

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