Aaarrrgh!!! It's Punch Bug, Not Punch Dub!

Okay, I know this has been out for awhile, but I just saw another one of VW's punch-happy commercials and I can't take it anymore! I grew up thinking that VWs had a kind of hippy coolness about them. The VW Bus, the classic Beetle... They brought images of Woodstock and free love before I had any idea what that meant. I just knew it was cool, and not your average sedan.

And then there were the commercials. For awhile there, VW had some great ads. There was the guy tackling the runaway grocery cart, and of course, the guy claiming his car by licking the door handle. But what happened?!?!

A few months ago, they started this Punch Dub Days ad campaign and it would have driven me crazy if it weren't for TiVo and the ability to fast-forward commercials. The trouble is, I--like most Americans my age--grew up shouting "Punch buggy!" and gleefully slugging my siblings. (We also had slapvettes, for even more arguments fun.)

And there were definite rules to the game: You had to call the color. You had to clarify no punch backs. And it absolutely had to be an actual VW Beetle! Not a VW Bus, or a VW Rabbit, or any other VW.

Now Volkswagen thinks that it's fine to take a beloved pop culture game and turn it into a marketing campaign- and not just one to sell the Beetle, which might have been okay, but to sell all of their cars. Punch Dub Days was not a clever marketing twist. It was a blatant, greedy attempt to commercialize an innocent game- one that has been giving them free advertising for decades.

I'm just not cool with that. I don't want to see a commercial with people punching each other over a Tiguan (or whatever it's called) or any other VW. I want Volkswagen to go back to the creative commercials that made me laugh. The ones that let me pretend that they weren't quite like all the other car companies, that they were something just a little bit different; a little more fun.