PSP Squirrels
PSP, It's like the nut, you can play it on outside.
A British ad for PlayStation Portable (PSP for short) from 2006.
Synopsis[]
A squirrel runs to a tree and hits nuts at it. He says "Come outside!". Another squirrel comes out of the tree and says that he is still playing a game with he calls "nut". The first squirrel holds up a nut and say that it's a nut you can play outside. The 2nd squirrel gasps with joy. It shows a PSP and the announcer says "PSP. It's like a nut that you can play with outside."
Why It's Cursed[]
It is cursed for being one of the most pandering, lowbrow, and tackiest commercials Sony has put out, if not the tackiest promotion for a video game console, ever. The squirrels are thinly veiled racist blackface caricatures, eager to use sexual innuendo (in the way that "a nut you can play with" meant towards how you can play with the PSP), and speak in "hip" ebonics, which further dates the commercial as an outdated relic (during the 2000s, rap music and culture began to make a larger headway into mainstream pop culture, from Eminem to Tupac to Nelly, and even with nu metal incorporating rap based vocals, but also brought about a large wave of posers trying to act "street" and "hardcore", one of which traits was to speak with an ebonic tilt with one's voice to evoke this aesthetic.).
The animation is also ghastly, unsightly, and tasteless, devoid of appeal and welcoming aesthetics, making it look cold, unnecessarily gritty, and rather bland and ugly. Its namesake feature characters are also demented and appear to be mentally not right in the head, always being deviously frisky, cackling manically, and unsympathetic and ill intentioned, almost as if they were sociopathic criminals or even demons.
Furthermore, the PSP was a portable console with a lot of great features and qualities that could had allowed it a lot of staying power in the video game industry and with a sizable audience, but was handled absolutely poorly by Sony's USA branch, which would only come to cease its production with a short life span. This commercial remains testament to how such a shoddy and crappy, even cursed, commercial, only lead to the death of a good video game system.