I was away from my computer all weekend until this evening,
getting a very nice break in the San Juan Islands. I hope to tell
you more about that later. In the meantime, I’d like to share an
“Amusing Monday” entry from May of last year. If you follow all the
various links in the blog post, you will see more videos of babies
— human, animal and unreal — than you could ever ask for.
—–
Can we ever really get enough videos of “water babies”?
It’s a silly question, as if we could ever satiate our Internet appetite for video clips of cats, dogs and teenage monologues.
But you have to admit there is something magical about babies swimming around under water like jellyfish, their arms and legs moving in a rhythmical fashion. Nobody taught them to do this.
Before I tell you how “water babies” evolved into Spider Man, I’d like to remind you of the human connection between mothers and babies. The first video shows how moms have somehow calmed their fears and learned to release their infants into a watery void. As for the babies, it seems their adjustment is minimal. (Oh, yes, there’s a dad in there, too.)
The second video covers the same subject from a different perspective. We learn about the “diving refliex” that gives human babies special powers to make a fully equipped diver look incredibly clumsy.
So this blog entry is the third time I’ve talked about swimming babies since 2010, when I recalled the Evian water babies and their synchronized swimming and other impossible feats, all produced on a green screen to sell a bottle of water. See “Amusing Monday” for Aug. 8, 2010. I also listed several videos of “dancing babies.”
In 2012, I stayed on the point of real-life swimming babies, including not only humans but also sea lions, beavers, hippos, otters, kangaroos, turtles and elephants. See “Amusing Monday” for Jan. 20, 2012.
Emma Bazilian of Ad Week magazine recalls how Evian began using babies to sell bottled water in 1998, when the first “water babies” commercial appeared. (“At least there was actual water involved,” she notes.)
Emma goes on the say: “Evian has a long history of incorporating creepy CGI babies in its ads, and an equally long history of viewers gobbling it up like it’s some variety of highly addictive crack cocaine.”
So we find ourselves watching “Roller Babies” commercials and then last year’s “Baby & Me,” which transports people back to their earliest days of life by staring at their reflection in a window. More interesting, I think, was when Evian took us behind the scenes for “The Making of Baby & Me.”
So what should come next in this evolution from swimming babies to time travel? The answer arrived last month, when the Amazing Spider Man began seeing his childhood image in front of a window. You can check out what happened in the third video player on this page.
“And that’s it,” as Emma Bazilian says. “No explanation of what this has to do with Evian, apart from the brand’s ‘Live Young’ tagline at the end. We don’t even get to see Spider-Baby’s cute little face.”
Maybe we’ll never know what baby Spidy looks like, but if you put “baby swimming” into a Google search and hit the “video” tab, you’ll get a chance to view 66 million videos of what I presume are mostly babies and water.
