| abstract | - On TV anything can be made to seem to talk. This is especially common in commercials, where everything from products, to signs, food, body parts, clothes and beyond has something to say. They all want you to buy something too, even your ratty old sneakers have sold out and are working for the man. One might think that consumers would want their foodstuffs and household products not to be possessed by demons (in fact, a recent Sprite commercial featured a family running in terror from the smiling anthropomorphic sun that burst forth from a bottle of a Sunny Delight counterpart), but apparently advertisers don't see it that way. At its worst, can become quite disturbing. Often combined with Animate Inanimate Object. Some specific subtypes of this are:
* Animate Body Parts
* Ghost in the Machine
* Let's Meet the Meat
* Ads for the dish detergent add in JetDry feature a talking JetDry/Detergent dispenser as part of a dishwasher.
* Long used in commercials for Parkay spread, where a tub of the margarine would contradict a housewife and insist that it was butter until she would taste and say "butter!", at which point the tub would smugly announce, "Parkaaaaaay!".
* Recent Mothers Against Drunk Driving ads targeted at drug-impaired driving involved stoned and confused characters being lectured by otherwise inanimate objects (such as a t-shirt) regarding their condition.
* A set of commercials for orange juice had a talking sandwich advise people opening the fridge to drink orange juice instead of going for their intended snack. The usual response of viewers was "If your leftovers are talking to you, your fridge is long overdue for cleaning..."
* It appears that recent Dr Pepper ads use talking soda cans. The mouth is the hole where the soda would come out in real life.
* They're singing, actually. In the voice of Flavor Flav.
* Tide is running ads, and possibly a contest, called "The Talking Stain."
* AMV Hell: The "Because I Got High" clip
* Video game example: In the Banjo-Kazooie series, NPC characters are usually a sentient version of an inanimate object, with googly eyes. This includes (but is by no means limited to) musical notes, honeycombs, hives, oranges, jigsaw pieces, Leaky the Bucket, Cheato the Cheatbook, Loggo the Toilet (!) and even the Banjo-Kazooie cartridge.
* Conkers Bad Fur Day, which is essentially a Rated "M" for Money version of Banjo-Kazooie from the same company, continues using this trope, frequently to darkly hilarious effect.
* Really, anything and everything can be a living, breathing character in a Rare game.
* The animated series The Twisted Tales Of Felix the Cat was set in a world where pretty much every single inanimate object was sentient, capable of speech and could spawn eyes, a nose and a mouth whenever necessary.
* Zula Patrol. Like The Twisted Tales Of Felix the Cat, but in a galaxy (or more) instead. But their homeworld cannot.
* Parodied in a Rosanne Bar cartoon special where she went to a land of cartoons where everything talked. She got off on eating food that screamed while she ate it.
* In an episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, he comments on an ad with a talking toilet, wondering why it wants its owner to shit in its mouth.
* A Gillette commercial features a razor blade talking to a guy and telling him that he should replace the blade when the indicator strip changes colour.
* In the beginning of Robert Winchester's "Half-Beard" flash cartoon, Rob has a conversation with his beard when he faces the necessity of shaving again. When he tells it to stop screaming in pain, it obliges.
* The third episode of Ranma Abridged featured a talking bucket of water. Well, it was the narrator speaking through the bucket of water, but he cried out "my spine!" as Ranma jumped on the bucket anyways.
* A recent Quizno's commercial features a seductive, deep-voiced oven convincing an employee to advertise a new sandwich in unmistakably come-hither fashion.
* Give me back that filet-o-fish! Give me that fish!
* Walgreens sells the actual fish pictured in that commercial. It's hysterical.
* In Chowder almost everything in that show is alive (but Chowder still freaks out when he finds a talking toilet).
* Taken to its logical, terrifying conclusion with this vid. "Stuff Talks When You're Not There 2: This Time, Everything Talks". Rated G.
* In the Xanth series of books, Magician Dor's talent makes this possible.
* In some car insurance commercials, things which cause damage, like a pipe which broke a tail light, a branch which broke a windshield, and a pot hole causing a flat tire, the things doing damage to talk with cliche accents. The pipe had a "Russian woman" accent, the branch had a "Brooklyn man " accent, and the pothole had a "red neck girl" accent.
* In a Garfield strip, Jon said it would nice if everything could talk, and the toaster would say "Good morning!". Garfield thought that every time a light bulb blew, it would be like a death in the family.
* Handy Manny with the talking tools.
* Parodied in a commercial (forget which product) which starts out as a standard breakfast food commercial until the happy orange juice container chirps up, at which point the family screams in terror and runs away.
* Are you talking about this Sprite commercial?
* "Okay, now the gloves are talking? Does everything Yui name talk?"
* Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
* Harry Potter. Just don't trust anything if you can't see where it keeps it's brain!
* Sometimes Chevron airs commercials with claymation cars that talk to each other.
* Pee-Wee's Playhouse, in which pretty much every single object in the house could talk, including a chair, a window, a globe, a clock, a kite, food, flowers, all animals, and even the floor. His name was Floory.
* And old ad for Alka-Seltzer had a man and his stomach being interviewed about heart burn. At one point, the man says he likes pepperoni pizza, at which the stomach rThe animated series Mentors.eplies, "Do you like heartburn? Well, you're going to get heartburn whenever you eat pepperoni pizza" The moderator informs both about Alka-Seltzer and all is well again.
* Following fairytale conventions, the Unreliable Narrator puts words in the mouths of trashcans, scissors, buckets, etc. in Rule of Rose.
* The Amazing World of Gumball; lampshaded once when Gumball tells a regular looking wall to get out of his way only for it to grow a face and respond to him, albeit saying he couldn't move because he was a wall.
* Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
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