Buck for Chegg.com

No one is better qualified to employ humor that’s so willfully tasteless as Buck. In a brood of spots for online textbook rental service, Chegg.com, Buck whets the appetite of college juvenescence by appealing to the lure of gross.

By satirizing the social life of college campus, Buck has tapped into the best (or worst) of gross-out humor by walking a tightrope between bad taste and charm. In fraternizing comical abnormality and sophomoric platitudes, the campaign owes a cultural debt to films like Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, who today, are considered fathers to this vile genre of toilet comedy. For Buck, however, the resulting spots exhibit all the hallmarks of bad taste: gratuitous nudity, uncontrollable bodily functions, and a knack for vulgarity that is inspired. In this campaign, nothing is too raunchy. Raunchy is the point.

For Buck’s ongoing liaison with cel-animation, this campaign is a homecoming, and could not have come at a better time. With so many studios churning out work in the spirit of synthetic, CG polish, Buck is taking the low road to refinement and serving up a look that’s more take-out than table-service. The aesthetic is grimy: illustrative, with a nervous sense of line-work that’s both fast and loose. In tone and nerve, it’s Bucks own brand of grossploitation: disagreeable to taste and a testimony to low humor of a high order.

6 Comments

dlew

I feel like they lack the weight and punch of Augenblicks animation, which was clearly the reference. Still, an excellent facsimile of that style.

wabash

Great stuff. Feels like Joe Mullen was a part of this? I like it a lot.

Brandon Lori

Yes, according to the credits (featured on the link to Buck’s website), he served as Art Director.

Sean

excellent work, to Matt and the rest of the crew! Thoroughly enjoyed them.

Candyman

I like them a lot.
The type of humor feels suitable for the target market.

its interesting how we often focus so much on making stuff just look nice that we forget about actually entertaining the vast majority of people that really don’t care about design. This entertains as well as stimulates the artistic senses.

Brandon Lori

Well said. We can often lose sight of “entertainment,” at the expense of audience enthusiasm. The general public, for the most part, doesn’t give a damn about design, but just wants to have a good time. That’s not to say we should abandon being designers (obviously), but we should, at the same time, always remember the factor of “appeal.”

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