Feel Good

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Three rabbits are sitting on a log,
and one of them goes home and hangs himself...

...Buy a bike!"

Young boys and girls are frolicking. Dad is smiling as he watches the game, and Mom is cheerfully making dinner. Then, before we know it, we're learning it's an ad for a plunger.

The Feel Good ad type is one that is known in the propaganda community as "transfer". Basically, viewer sees or hears X (such as a young boy playing with puppies), viewer sees or hears Y (such as hearing a man talk about a really smooth soft drink), and viewer will equate X with Y regardless of whether or not they're similar. Such is the Feel Good.

It's also a common practice in political ads, as politicians will try and show that hey, they care about the working citizen.

Also the number one reason people ask: Yes but What Does Zataproximetacine DO!?

Examples of Feel Good include:

Food and Drinks

  • This trope reaches its logical conclusion with Blue Bell Ice Cream: "Blue Bell tastes just like the good old days".
  • Do you tropers recall Pepperidge Farm's commercials based on this trope? Pepperidge Farm remembers!

Hygiene

  • Every tampon commercial ever made.
    • Hence the joke about the little boy who walks into a drugstore to buy tampons: "My sister says you can swim and ride a bike if you wear one, and I can't do either of those things!"
    • Kotex even began to parody the the point of ridiculousness it's gotten to.
  • And pretty much all other manner of feminine hygiene product as well.
    • It's something to do with fire hydrants and enigmatic blue liquids?
    • Skewered in Family Guy in a fake ad where the mother is trying to talk to the daughter about it. But all the daughter can recall are happy images.

Medicine

  • And who can forget those STD treatment ads? With so many people cheerfully proclaiming that they have herpes or genital warts, you have to start wondering why they're afraid to spread the apparent joy.
  • "Male-enhancement" products, particularly Cialis, tend to be particularly guilty of this.
    • And don't forget Smilin' Bob of the Enzyte commercials...apparently Enzyte also freezes your face into a permanent rictus of glee.
  • Many US prescription ads do this where you see happy people living their lives and the narrator suddenly mentions a new cholesterol pill.

Politics

  • The infamous Daisy ad for Lyndon B Johnson's 1964 US presidential campaign starts off this way, with an adorable girl in a meadow counting the petals she's pulling off a daisy. Then subtly subverts it by starting a menacing countdown, zooming in on the girl's eye and cutting to an a nuclear explosion. Extremely controversial, it aired only once.

Restaurants

  • McDonald's or any fast food restaurant. No teenager in the history of the world is happy enough to want to know what you want for dinner, even if they are getting paid.