The first time we saw this Walmart clown commercial, we burst out laughing. Happened the second and third time, too.

But we've heard others say the exact opposite. "Clowns are creepy!" they say. "Even creepier when they start yelling for no apparent reason!"

Ok, so let's analyze the commercial. It's a birthday party for a kid. The mom is all happy that they saved money by buying the food, decorations and supplies at Walmart. In fact, they saved so much money that they had enough left over to buy a clown costume.

Watch the video after the jump.

Clowns are scary. I've known people who wouldn't flinch to kill a man with their bare hands who would run screaming at the first site of one of Bozo's children. Their faces are painted in permanent smiles, their hair is never a natural color, and they are always wearing a one-piece suit, which is mysterious. How'd they get in there?

The fear is immediate, which is what makes clowns so effective in commercials. Just have a few seconds to communicate something scary? Send in the clowns. Here are a few currently or recently in circulation.

(S05E11) The title of this episode led me to expect something much different than what we ended up seeing. The reference to The Life Aquatic made me think that this episode would find the Griffin's on some sort of adventure. No such luck there, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think that idea could have made for a funny episode, but this one worked out ok.

It was something of the opposite of "Peter's Two Dads." Where that one excelled with the structure of the story, this one wasn't as strong. But the collection of cutaways presented with this episode was far superior. Of course, given that I only liked one of them last week, that's a pretty low bar. We'll save those for last though, and get to the meat of the episode. As is often the case, we had a Peter story balanced with a Stewie story.

If you are looking to make the move to HDTV, tomorrow would be a good day to do it. There are quite a few deals to be had on HD sets this year. Just make sure you are up and at 'em plenty early as supplies are limited. Rather than chase down all of those old-school paper ads, gottadeal.com's Black Friday page is the place to go to get the lowdown on offerings from all the major stores. One of the rumored deals to be coming is a 52" RCA Widescreen HDTV for $474 at WalMart. If you are looking for something specific, you might want to check out the fatwallet.com thread that lists all of the TV deals.

Unfortunately, there are also reports on the gottadeal forum that a WalMart in Dallas already has 70 people in line for tomorrow. But if you can't be bothered to trek over to the Best Buy at 5AM, or.. now, they also have a page of the deals that are available for online ordering as well. Of course, it's not all about HDTV. TV fans will find deals on all manner of things. DVD players, season sets, surround sound systems, the free Tivo with activation. I have my eye on Season 1 of The Office for $8.99 at Circuit City.

Hey students, see if you can figure out what's wrong with this scenario:

 

You click over to Wal-Mart's site to purchase a copy of the Planet of the Apes TV series on DVD. You click on the DVD and are given a list of similar movies as recommendations. Oddly enough, all the movies feature African-Americans. It seems this bit of covert online racism set off some backlash recently, which isn't difficult for Wal-Mart to conjure up since most people don't need much recourse to hate the mega-chain. The company itself issued an apology, but it still remains unclear as to just why it happened in the first place. The company says it was promoting films with African-Americans in honor of the upcoming Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, but that doesn't quite explain this incident.