The White Dog Family Softbank ads (ダンテ・カーヴァー)

The funniest TV commercials are the Softbank "White Family Plan" ads. In the ads, the father is a white dog, the mother is a Japanese woman, the daughter is a famous Japanese pop star and the brother is an African-American man. The ads are funny because the father is really strict but he's a dog, so he's adorable. The family doesn't make any sense to look at, but they act like a regular, typical Japanese family and that's why it's funny. This ad series is infinitely better than those annoying Cameron Diaz ads from last year.
This was the first Softbank ad I saw. It had no subtitles, so I'll tell you what happens since it's all in French and Japanese. In this ad, the family meets a French tourist in the park. He compliments the sister's phone and the sister doesn't understand what he says, so she hits her brother and asks him to translate the English. He tells her he doesn't understand either: it wasn't English. The father (the dog) speaks to the tourist in French and his daughter brags, "My dad speaks English!" and when the mother tells her it wasn't English, he's really impressed that her dad speaks French, too.

Softbank ads have been getting better and better. Last month in Shinjuku, I was walking past that huge TV near the station and heard France Gall playing. She's one of my favorite singers, but I was shocked to hear her because she's a 1960's French pop singer that not many people know. It was a Softbank ad with Brad Pitt in it. It was a happy surprise for me. I'm with AU though. Their CMs aren't bad either. AU's most recent ads look stylish like Wes Anderson movies.

ダンテ・カーヴァー The African-American actor is called Dante Carver and he's from NYC. He is a good example of "big in Japan" because absolutely everyone knows him over here, but he's not famous when he goes home. People call him 予想 the Yoso Guy (Yosogai means "unexpected" in Japanese because of the funny choice of casting him as the young Japanese son of a Japanese mother and a cute, white dog.) or Oniisan (that's his name on the commercial. It means "elder brother") I'll bet that actor couldn't walk down any street in Japan without being recognized. He's so popular. There are even Japanese websites where people can post their Dante Carver fan art. He was recently used in an NTV debate about the 2008 American election. That caused a lot of controversy because people wondered why they didn't get a more qualified person to speak as the American. Beyond being an African-American residing in Japan, he isn't versed in politics. He's a lovable and popular icon in Japan and speaks beautiful Japanese, but he's still a model-slash-actor. He didn't even speak in Japanese on that program. Was he really the most qualified American they could find to talk about the American election? That would be like inviting Ebi-Chan or Kimura Takuya as the Japanese representative to discuss the Japanese economic crisis for Fox News. Good for Dante Carver, though. He speaks great Japanese, has become absurdly popular and is probably very happy and wealthy because of these ads. He recently got a job on a popular Japanese kid's show. It's actually really hard to find any information about him in English. Ha. If you search for him in katakana, you come up with hundreds of links but in English, he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry.