Zack Rippy

I took Taylor to see Bee Movie the other night and saw an interesting JC Penney commercial. It is called “The Aviator” and is about a little girl who tries to build a rocket ship to go visit Santa at the North Pole. It’s actually a good little short. Well, the full version is - the television cut is too short and doesn’t really work.

Anyways, what is interesting about this is that the soundtrack to the commercial is a piano demo by John Lennon called “Real Love.” It’s a great song that was re-worked by the remaining Beatles for release on Anthology 2 in 1996. I love this stripped-down version. It’s one of his acoustic home demos - he never finished it. This marks the first time to my knowledge that a Beatle or his survivor (Yoko Ono in this case) has permitted original recordings by a member of the band to be used in a commercial advertisement (The original recording of “Revolution” was used by Nike over the objections of the former band members.).

It’s a very strange commercial because it certainly doesn’t make me want to go Christmas shopping. Still, it is intriguing to me for some reason. It would have worked better as a movie short than it does as an advertisement. I do like it and I cannot get the song out of my head. Check it out below.

The song is available on a couple Lennon compilations - Acoustic and Working Class Hero: The Definitive John Lennon Collection.

Actually, if anyone cares, the exact version/take used is only found on the Working Class Hero collection.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Media, Movies/TV, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.