Background
Siimon Reynolds on the idea of the commercial:
...bowling was in my head. I was bowling every week. And I used to love the animation at Christmas with... for Scrooge, where the Grim Reaper came and visited Scrooge. And I thought, "Well, maybe the Grim Reaper could machine-gun them." Then I thought, no, that'll be a five-second ad and it'll be too short. What's another way he could kill them? He could bowl balls at them. And those two things came together.
Of course, back then, the data was unclear. In some countries - for instance, Italy - almost as many women who had AIDS as men. I think there was also a bit of a political fear that there'll be a backlash against gays if everybody thinks it's some kind of gay plague. But, you know, other countries had failed in their AIDS education because heterosexuals weren't listening. We really had to wake people up. There was a lot of information about how stop AIDS out there, but no-one was reading it.
Read more about this topic: Grim Reaper (advertisement)
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