Bear vs. wolves.

Bear Grylls, the man us men will never be like – LOOK AT THAT NAME ALONE – is now shilling Degree’s anti-wolf perspiration protection. While I give Mr. Bear utmost respect for trying to catch a shark for dinner from the beach – by hand – I still go back to outpost.com for true free-range wolf terror though. Yeah, I don’t know, I thought we were supposed to get more refined across the board, instead, things seems to be inconsistent and disproportionately more sophomoric, especially in terms of executions of themes that came before. Sure Axe appeals to a younger male demo, and of course in the same category, Old Spice smartly rewrote the book on what it meant to be a manly man. In both their cases, they were and are, over the top parodies of a past where guys wore aftershave as cologne, and Hai Karate, English Leather or Brute meant you got chicks man, chicks.

Degree here just comes off looking me too-ish. (Sure, Old Spice got pretty *out there* with Terry ‘Power’ Crews or  Ray Lewis animal laser themes, but they could go there because the brand already set you up for it with the initial Bruce Campbell work.) I’ll concede the flipside though, that maybe Degree is not that far off the mark of the real man mission statement here, let alone what it means to younger dudes in a post-Napoleon Dynamite world. Dudes who, based on this spot, prefer more outlandish *try anything* executions like meat suits and wolves, no matter if it’s already been done.