Brian sent me this funny news: Dog misses planted drugs in Japan, customs embarrassed. I like the comments attached to the news. "Some random traveler received a very special gift. No doubt Japan will become an even more popular vacation spot from now on ;-)". Exactly.
That is very interesting: Subliminal message in KFC's TV ad. Does it mean "only one dollar"? And is it okay to do that on TV in the US? Subliminal messages are banned by broadcasting rules. The rule was fixed in 1995. When some members of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo were arrested after the Tokyo sarin gas attacks, TBS had a special TV documentary about Aum, where they inserted many photos of Shoko Asahara in the show to impress the show upon its audience. It was big news and TBS apologized later. In another case, Asahara's photo was inserted into the anime "City Hunter 3 #11" (his photo had the worst but the strongest impression upon people in those days) and NTV apologized later. Inserting some unrelated cut into regular cuts of shows was used in Japanese animation as a joke since 1980 in "Urusei Yatsura". But after the TBS and NTV incidents, NHK and NACB banned subliminal messages as part of their broadcasting rules.
However, even now we still sometimes find subliminal messages on TV. This is one of JOCX network's ending messages; they aired this one at the end of the broadcasting day at night. JUGLE was their copy in those days. I have no idea why they chose a rotting heart. By the way, you can see the word "AIDS" on the heart. More recently, in the opening theme song of the animation "Area 88", some naked falling people and the words "war" and "attack" were inserted. Since they deleted these pics and photos after they caught this subliminal message, I am not sure if this version has the images or not. If it is not public broadcasting, I guess there is no rule for using subliminal messages. So we could be watching them without knowing it at theaters or in videos. This is a well known one: "Evangelion scene with many subliminal messages." In that scene, you can see many gloomy subliminal messages: "Hirono died" and 2ch dark messages, etc.
Sorry this is a little off-topic, but how is your new job going, Mari-san? (^-^)
Posted by: Heidi | Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 11:18 AM