February 6, 2008
No More Pandas with Chinese Accents
An animal near and dear to the Gothamist heart has been embroiled in a Super Bowl controversy! This year's wardrobe malfunction is now the debate over an animated ad from SalesGenie.com that features pandas.
During the commercials, two pandas discuss how to stay in business while speaking with Chinese (English-as-a-second-language) accents. There is also one panda who speaks in non-accented English. After the growing criticism (even College Humor dubbed it "the first commercial to offend over 1 billion people"), Salesgenie CEO Vin Gupta - who wrote the panda ad and his company's other Super Bowl ad with the South Asian man - told the NY Times the panda ad would be withdrawn.
“We never thought anyone would be offended,” said Mr. Gupta, who developed and wrote both commercials himself.Dude, if he produces an ad with a baby polar bear for next year's Super Bowl, it better have an accent straight out of Nuremberg! Still, the ad with Ramesh (who mentions his seven children) will still be shown, and Gupta ("who described himself in the interview as half-Indian and half-Jewish") said, “People have been making fun of my accent for years. And I love it.”“The pandas are Chinese,” he said. “They don’t speak German.”
Still, “if I offended anybody,” Mr. Gupta said, “believe me, I apologize.”
Did you think the ad was racist? We just thought it was just terrible first and offensive second. It now sounds more misguided, in the same way trying to use "ching chong" as fake Chinese isn't the greatest idea. And after the jump, our video of two pandas fighting over a shirt.
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he didn't even do it right. They kind of half pronunced their r's correctly. Now that's offensive.
"We just thought it was just terrible first and offensive second. It now sounds more misguided.."
I agree. It's a lame commercial but I'm not offended but I can see why people would be offended. It's just a commercial. It's not a big deal. =/
We're a nation of sissies and complainers.
“People have been making fun of my accent for years. And I love it.”
um, yeah, i'm sure he does. i'm asian and found both commercials offensive - shocking more for that fact that people are getting paid to stoop to such cheap, low-brow, utterly puerile racist jokes, and nobody stopped them.
if people just for a second think things through.
but that's too much to ask.
As an Asian-American, i'm not offended. Jackie Chan has made his career here talking like that. What's the problem? It's a freaking cartoon panda. If it had a British accent no one would complain. It just makes it seem like we (Asians) have no sense of humor and need dumb-ass special interest groups to protect us.
As a human being, i'm offended because that commercial was just so lame.
They also did a similar commercial before the game with an Indian guy who begs his boss not to fire him in an Apu style accent.
If anything I think it shows the diversity of they country and that many people in business are recent immigrants.
Also, speaking of Apu, where is gothamist's feigned outrage about that?
and the commercial really sux, if that's the best
they could do for a super Bowl commercial that company really suks.
no, you don't get these leads.
actually I would complain if they had Brit accents.
it hurts my ears when I hear that chinbrit being spoken.
Well it was salesgenie.com and they suck anyway. I don't see the big deal myself, I watched it with a few Asian people and they laughed at it.
What Asian accents? "Ching ching" sounds like she has a Bronx Dominican accent - now that's offensive...!
It was a pretty awful and offensive commercial. Everything from the pandas with bad engrish accents to the bamboo and typeface used in the commercial. Asians who don't find this offensive are probably too whitewashed to even notice.
It was a pretty awful and offensive commercial. Everything from the pandas with bad engrish accents to the bamboo and typeface used in the commercial. Asians who don't find this offensive are probably too whitewashed to even notice.
It's not racist -- after all, Chinese immigrants do sometimes have an accent. Is it racist to depict that? Is it racist to imitate a southern accent when we want to depict someone from Alabama, or a Jamaican accent when we depict someone from Jamaica?
I still have traces of a Spanish accent, and I have no problem with hearing Spanish accents imitated. I think it's funny, when done right.
But it's an awful commercial! It's just bad. Nasty bad.
Personally, you know whose accent bothers the hell out of me? the modern Shrek's accent. Now why does he have to have that accent? It's ridiculous. English people should be offended.
The offensive part is that anyone who's watched pandas for even a few minutes knows they don't have an ounce of ambition or motivation in their bamboo bloated butts. Pandas do nothing and they are awesome at doing nothing. The best ever really. It's really just a case of mis-casting.
When I saw this commercial I actually wondered how long it would take for someone to be offended by it.
The CEO admitted that he set out to make the worst and most offensive ads of the Superbowl. I got douche-chills just watching those ads, along with Mencia's. The biggest problem with these ads was that the stereotypes were used to little or no effect, just laughing at foreigners.
fakenewyorker - hey you noticed Mencia's racist commercial too! All the dorks were foreign looking guys with accents who can't get chicks except with the aid of beer. They threw in an obligatory white dork in for one shot, but he didn't speak or appear again.
Reinforcing racial stereotypes is fun!
I was offended only because I felt like I should be offended. If the commercial had been funny I might have felt different.
It don't matter if this offends you or not, so long as Gothamist gets their much need traffic here to pay its bills.
Ha, the funny thing here is that the very badness of the commercial, and its offensiveness is what got people to notice it -- and got all these people on Gothamist to comment on it. The How the World Works column on Salon talks about how this was the intent of the CEO who wrote the commercial -- to make it bad enough and offensive enough to get people to notice it.
This is an old advertising technique really -- everyone always hated "ring around the collar", but it played for years because it worked. But this is a really, really high profile spot for intentionally annoying advertising.
Kind of interesting, if also soul-less.
cucarachita: you may have been joking but Shrek has more of a scottish accent than english
You people probably don't like Britney's Southern English accent either.
I love how the CEO wrote the commercials himself. HEY, GENIUS, HIRE SOMEONE!
Well, now I know why noone at the ad agency or salesgenie said anything about these spots as they were being produced: the CEO wrote them.
I was more offended at the poor production quality.
It's amusing that a South Indian wrote the commercial that he should concievably be offended at. I guess he knows alot of fellow Indians toiling for whitey and with gaggles of kids.
Shouldn't the genie panda have had a Middle Eastern accent?
Lesson: short your salesgenie.com stock.
Would any business owner in his/her right mind use this service to generate "leads"?
If Glengarry Glen Ross is even vaguely representative of sales douchebags, I think the ads accomplished exactly what they likely intended: free publicity for a business model that attracts money-hungry sharks who probably give the least amount of shit about political correctness. I think the technical term is: "chumming."
don't asian people remind you of the R0bear Berbils on thundercats? It's like they are these little android bear robots that everyone likes to pick on cause they are an insular society that likes to produce goods and just live without encroaching on others.
overall i think we all need to lighten up and stop being so sensitive.
but i would like to point out that some accents are perceived as a plus, other accents are perceived as otherwise.
for instance: anytime a brit friend of mine opens her mouth at a meeting, it's automatically assumed that she knows what she's talking about. positive assumptions are ascribed to her because of her accent.
at the same meeting if an asian guy contributes a valid point, but packaged in a chinese accent, the same assumptions are not granted. fact is, we assume someone thinks the way they speak.
in a social capital context, british, french, italian, latin accents are commonly noted as being desirable, even sexy; so anyone or any panda portrayed with a western accent is usually a good thing. because of fundamental linguistic/tonal differences between east asian languages and western languages, eastern inflected accents, to the western listener, often come across odd if not flat out undesirable --- not flattering for the speaker.
finally, i also noticed in the commercial, the male panda has the heavier accent.
that said, we shouldn't be so sensitive. if there's a stereotype asians need/want to counter, rather than complaining, they should just get out there and be that counter-stereotype.
asian guy, home w/ da flu
I'd love to see the close ratio on those 100 free sales leads you receive. "Chumming" is right.
shiite, sorry bout the multiple posts. server errors...
didn't realize how thin yellow skin is. THE BIGGEST crybabies.
let them cry hughgass, you just look like a douche and a bigger crybaby for whining about it.
Asians may talk funny but at least they're not lowlife leeches among our society.
Pandas are indigenous to China, so if by some miracle they were able to speak, opened their own business in China, and then learned English, it would be safe to assume they would speak with a Chinese accent. Pandas are at an advantage in China, as they are exempt from the government's "one child" policy. They have also avoided joining Falun Gong, also a smart move.
"Yo quiero Taco Bell"
"Always after me Lucky Charms"
Ethnic characters are often used to sell crappy products. Sometimes, they are offensive, sometimes they are not. Does anybody remember The Frito Bandito?
Geico pokes fun of this concept by offending cavemen.
It's obvious Mr. Gupta succeeded in getting the attention he craves.
Let's ignore this and maybe it will go away.
Me and my white friend were watching it at a house with a bunch of Chinese people. Talk about awkward...
Alex, do those Chinese people have an accent? The point is do they make the conection between them and the pandas.
The ad is a success; it got people talking about it. It is cartoonish, cute.