There is a definite trend of companies recycling their expensive adverts of yesteryear in order to save themselves a bit of cash. To be honest, there isn’t a lot we can say as a criticism of that. Times are tough and if your product hasn’t changed very much then why bother going to the effort of making a whole new advert to extoll the exact same virtues.

While there’s nothing wrong with it on the face of it, some ads remind us that they were completely awful in the first place and, like last week, we’re looking into the murky, sugar-loaded world of soft drinks.

Are they a bargain? ‘Cause everyone loves a bargain, and don’t try to pretend that you don’t. There is evidence to suggest that we are more likely to buy things if they are on some kind of offer, be it ‘buy one get one free’, ‘two for the price of one’ or ‘buy six and get thirty free pictures of stick-men in various sexual positions’.

However sometimes getting two for the price of one isn’t as good as it may seem.

Take this prime example from Fanta:

Let’s not waste too much time on this. Why are these cuddly cartoon characters partying it up with Fanta? Fanta with no alcohol in it. Perhaps it’s a very British attitude to have but alcohol is party juice. We’ve never had a sip of Fanta and felt compelled to crowdsurf, unless it was to crowdsurf to the Coca Cola Company’s HQ and tell them that it doesn’t taste as good as it used to and ask them if they’ve tried Orangina.

Still. Perhaps this ad will teach us the best way to recover from awkward social situations at parties. This las recovers using mime as a form of modern dance. MIME! If you used mime as a method of recovering from an embarrassing door-face-interaction you’d be laughed out of that party into the waiting arms of a junkie who would promise to take you back in time to 1936 when that move was cool.

Boys don’t like to be phantom-lassoed. Just a hint there, ladies.

Demographically, the first part of the advert is confusing. This party infested by Bieber/Jonas-ites (similarity to parasites withstanding) who don’t want to drink or have crazy sex at a party but just stand around and drink Fanta. Who’s the demographic for this advert? Is it only being shown on the Disney channel?

We thought that this train of thought might peter out but then we popped on to Fanta’s official website and saw The Fantanas; a girl band manufactured to sing songs about the beautiful taste of Fanta.

Is it too much to hope that Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato will be sharpening their bitch-sticks and trimming their mullets ready for some kind of gimp-pop showdown with these girls? Coming to Disney Channel Pay-Per-View soon!

Still, let’s move onto the tagline, shall we?

“MORE FANTA. LESS SERIOUS.”

More Fanta, less serious is the entire tag to this advert. Less serious about fun, less serious about taste, less serious about music, less serious about styles of dancing that aren’t entirely anachronistic, less serious about advertising.

Possibly the thing that irks us the most is the fact that it’s not over yet.

You probably don’t want to buy a bottle of Fanta yet so let’s have an entirely different advert with an entirely different feel. Why they did this, no-one knows, but we can only imagine that the graphics people were on a roll and just launched straight into a new advert.

They’ve taken the most boring situation possible, some kind of lecture where the lecturer stands in silence, reading the latest Dan Brown novel and ignoring the class. They’re bored of the lazy, untalented writing style which oozes from the page like a noxious gas. This putrid, useless pile of paper is scarcely worthy of propping open the door of this classroom. The door through which the class are about to rush out of into the Friday sun to their friends and Fanta and a complete lack of fun or entertainment.

The clock dings (helpfully, it says Friday so it saves you having to climb inside the television and consult a calendar) and suddenly the room is transformed into a club. A club. It’s 5 o’clock on a Friday! Go home and get changed. Have some dinner or something! Responsible drinking kids. Drinking Fanta in excess will make you all gassy.

“GRAB A TASTE OF FRIDAY.”

Answer us this, ladies and gentlemen. Does Fanta taste like Friday? Just because it’s alliterative? Of course it doesn’t. For a start, we’ve seen one of these things on a Tuesday. What are they saying to us?

“You still have most of the week to get through before you’ll be able to lick any surface and it will taste like Fanta! Ha!”

How dare they.

What’s a true taste of Friday? Revomitted vodka. Get to work, people.

When Dan Brown writes a new book, he doesn’t need to advertise it – the book can advertise itself.

You’ve seen the millions of commuters all holding Dan Brown’s books up to their nose every morning. And you’ve seen packs of sweaty, clueless-looking Americans stumbling around Paris and Rome squawking “Ooh, The Da Vinci Code! Ooh, Angels & Demons!” in the belief that The Louvre was only built so that Tom Hanks could run around it in a funny wig.

But still, Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol comes out soon, and this time he is advertising it. On FACEBOOK!

There’s no doubt that Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol will be a massive success. This is because all his other books are massive successes. This is because Dan Brown understands that making idiots feel intelligent in a slightly patronising way is absurdly profitable.

Dan Brown has found his formula and it works – take a lead character with a bewilderingly awful haircut, have him run around a European city while looking quizzically at an old book, build everything up to a climax that doesn’t make any sense and then blame the Catholics for everything. Bingo. Another truckload of cash to Mr Brown.

And everyone’s confident that the formula works, because five million copies are going to be published in the first run alone. Whichever way you look at it, you’re not going to be able to escape it. People will be reading it on the bus. People will be talking about it on TV, bookshops – remembering the wave of excitement when Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows was released – will organise special midnight opening events where lonely people can dress up as a crap-haired detective or a burning pope or whatever.

But at least you can keep away from all the The Lost Symbol kerfuffle on the internet, right? It’s not like anyone’s going to suddenly ambush you about it on Facebook, right? WRONG! AP reports:

Publisher Doubleday announced Tuesday that Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” — his first novel since “The Da Vinci Code” — will be preceded by a summer-long procession of “codes, cryptic trivia, puzzles, secret history, maps, aphorisms” and other daily teasers on Facebook and Twitter.

Oh goody. We genuinely can’t wait for someone on Twitter called @Robert_Langdon to start following us so that he can bombard us with endless cryptic messages like “I need help decoding this anagram. It says: BUY THE NEW DAN BORWN BOOK” and “Does anyone know a good conditioner for shit hair that looks like it was carved out of a chunk of vinyl?” and “Hey, remember the time my mate turned out to be descended from Jesus? What an inexplicable coincidence that was.”

No, really. We can’t wait for that.

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Honestly Ron Howard, talk about phoning it in. Yes, we all know how successful The Da Vinci Code was, but put some effort in.

Because its sequel Angels & Demons might be the top movie at the weekend box office this week, but have you ever considered what made The Da Vinci Code so popular in the first place? That’s right – Tom Hanks’ tatty old mullet.

But look at his Angels & Demons haircut, for crying out loud. It’s almost normal. Honestly, there had better be a deleted DVD scene where Tom Hanks gives himself a bubble perm, or there’ll be riots.
So Angels & Demons is the US weekend box office number one, and we’ll admit to being a little surprised. Because, you know, it’s an adaptation of a Dan Brown book, so everyone already knows what they’ll get – a drop of anti-Catholic rhetoric, some gormless cryptic clues, enough real-life locations to ensure that anywhere mentioned in the book will get overrun by fat Americans shouting at each other about McDonalds for the next decade and terrible, terrible haircuts.

The worst thing about Angels & Demons, though, is that we suspect we’re going to look back on its time at the top of the US weekend box office fondly purely because it isn’t an impenetrable film about robots punching each other. Such a shame. Here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - Angels & Demons (Ron Howard may argue that Angels & Demons isn’t an anti-Catholic film, but did you know that the working title of Dan Brown’s first draft was entitled The Pope Has A Bum Where His Face Should Be And He Poos Out Of His Face And Then He Eats It With His Bum Which Is Also His Face? True story. Well, true-ish) $48,000,000

2 - Star Trek (It’s a controversial admission, we know, but we couldn’t find much to like about Star Trek. Next time put Captain Kirk in a girdle and a wig like nature intended and we’ll think about revising our opinion) $43,000,000

3 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine (No wonder Wolverine looks so angry all the time. If you’d sent your entire upbringing dropping to your knees and howling “NOOOO!” to the heavens every three seconds you’d be pretty narked off too) $14,800,000

4 - Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past (Where Matthew McConaughey sets out to sexually defile the corpses of all of his dead girlfriends. We assume) $6,860,000

5 – Obsessed (The moral of this film is supposedly ‘be careful who you flirt with’ even though, in our considered opinion, it’s actually ‘don’t watch Obsessed’) $4,550,000

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The problem with filming the devil’s movies is that if any of the scenes require the architecture of a church, the owners of said church, along with their serious-minded boards of directors, must pass off on it.

This is where Angels and Demons has recently run into trouble. There is a scene in the book where Tom Hanks & a hot German woman named Elsa (who’d only recently slept with his father) break through a church floor, follow some flowing gasoline through a gathered crowd of rats to an old dead knight with a clue on his shield.

Now they can’t film any of this on location – the Rome Diocese has banned it.

The location slack will reportedly be picked up by two Kingdom Halls and a Mormon stake center. This of course means not a single gargoyle will be shot on camera. It’s bad because they need a gargoyle that comes to life just in time to save Tom Hanks from the exploding jelly truck. It’s really a pinnacle scene.

Thanks a lot, Diocese.

When The Da Vinci Code burst on to movie screens just before the book based on it was released, thousands of people everywhere cheered because it had been advertised as a Harry Potter sequel. Then, of course, it wasn’t and people cut theater screens with pocket knives out of rage.

Those people should have listened to the Catholic church – they’d been warning since Paul’s first epistle to the Romans not to see that movie. After seeing it ourselves we think the reasoning may just have been the poor plot line.

Whatever the reason, now Dan Brown‘s prequel book Angels & Demons is in Italy getting filmed, and they needed some church locations to do so.

On this front all is not going well, as the New York Times will no doubt tell you:

“Two years after Vatican officials urged a boycott of the film “The Da Vinci Code,” based on Mr. Brown’s blockbuster novel, the Rome diocese said Monday that two churches had been declared off limits to film crews for “Angels & Demons,” the “Da Vinci Code” prequel, The Associated Press reported. Msgr. Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the diocese, said that the film “does not conform to our views” and “treats religious issues in a way that contrasts with common religious sentiment.” Permission to film inside Santa Maria del Popolo, above, and Santa Maria della Vittoria, both in central Rome, was denied in 2007, but the situation did not become crucial until now because production of the movie was delayed by the writers’ strike.”

Luckily the ban only means the insides of the churches are off limits – the outsides are still a go. Maybe with a system of harnesses and a sideways camera the scenes could be shot with Tom Hanks walking along an outer wall as if it were an inner floor. CGI could be used to put in a ceiling and visually fix the gravitational pull on that bad wig.

We’re just throwing out options here.