Animate Body Parts

Some commercials feature parts of the human body with their own separate personalities and desires. The body part in question usually has something to do with the product being sold, and may or may not be connected to a full human body.

See also Giant Hands of Doom.

Examples of Animate Body Parts include:

Advertising

• The Palmolive dish soap ads regularly feature a pair of hands. They were originally actual people's hands with animated eyes and hair, but are now animated completely.
  • Another Palmolive ad had a family of hands arguing about who would get to do the dishes. There was even a dog, also played by an animated human hand.
• A recent car ad, for Mazda, had people's toes which were singing and tapping out the rhythm of a song because the car was so much fun to drive.
• A series of commercials for an allergy product during the late 1990s featured a disembodied human nose at their main character.
• One disturbing '90s ad for low-cut jeans had a belly-button sing "I'm Coming Out".
• An infamous 90s Reebok advert went a bit further than this and showed a disembodied giant hairy belly chasing an athletic man through a city, mostly by hopping gelatinously but culminating in a motorbike chase, while repeatedly shouting "Belly's gonna get ya!". You can view the madness here.
• A recent ad for an athlete's foot product has a claymation foot, still attached to its owner, catch fire, grow a pair of evil eyes, and charge at everyone nearby, roaring. Made even creepier by the commercial's combination of claymation and live-action footage.
• An antacid commercial featured an anthropomorphic stomach in a busted-up hotel room checking out of it to the tune of Heartbreak Hotel.
• Allergy commercials with giant talking noses; too many to describe.
• This Coke Zero commercial, where the body parts themselves have decidedly non-human legs. And what kind of person has two tongues and one eye?
• Recent Ballpark Franks commercials feature an arm emerging from a person's stomach representing their hunger, forcing the person to eat a hot dog using various levels of subtlety. "HUNGER GET WHAT HUNGER WANT"
• A California Milk Board's ad may be creepiest example of this trope: A woman in the kitchen suddenly flops out of sight behind the counter. Her skeleton stands up, absent any other tissue. The woman's discarded, fully clothed and otherwise 'undamaged' flesh, just lies there on the floor... and when the woman's skeleton reassures the husband that she's just getting herself some milk, her eyes... roll... towards where the skeleton is standing now.
  • You mean this ad?
• A UK advert for an itch relief cream featured a talking patch of skin that sounded like a falsetto Bill Bailey, and attempted to urge the woman in the advert to give it "just one little scratch", eventually screaming "Aaah! Not Eumavate!" when the cream was applied.
• Dr. Scholls has a wart remover commercial where the wart talks.
• There is an advert occasionally seen in Britain featuring faces made of hands talking about, oddly enough, Adult Learning courses or something similar. It does make slightly more sense in context; the tagline is "Our future. It's in our hands."
• There is a new phone out whose selling point is that it has a full keyboard, enabling you to "text it how you say it." The commercial consists of various people's thumbs (with their faces on them, mind you) speaking as they type.
• An Australian Ad for Tooheys Extra Dry features a tongue which dislodges itself from its sleeping owner's mouth before wiggling itself to a party, where it dives into a bathtub of ice and bottles of beer, wraps itself around the Tooheys Extra Dry and drags it back to its owner who wakes up wondering why he has a bottle in his mouth.
• A vintage Alka-Seltzer ad had a man arguing with his stomach, just as if they were a bickering couple at a marriage counselor. (Note the stomach's voice: it's Gene Wilder.)

Stomach: . . . the way he stuffs himself at his mother's!
Man: You always hated my mother!

• An ad for some sort of cough medicine features a talking hand wanting the person its attached to to take the medicine instead of coughing into it.
• Those Lectric Shave commercials where his beard hairs look exactly like him and look happy as they're being shaved away into oblivion.
• In a recent Tabasco Sauce ad, there are pepperonis with faces on them that sing about the sauce. There are two variations of this commercial. one with a sing-along subtitle on it, and one without.
• One of Old Spice's new "Odor Blocker body wash" commercials.

Spokesman: ...Its blocking power is as powerful as me!
Voice: Yeah it is.
Spokesman: Who said that? (arm grows out of right bicep, pointing at the left bicep) Was that my left bicep? No. It was my...
Abs: (in previous voice) Ab-dominals.

Film

• The final segment of the movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), featuring Woody Allen as a sperm.
• Played for Laughs in The Goblins of Labyrinth, a Terry Jones/Brian Froud collaboration tie-in to the movie. One species of goblin has a detachable penis responsible for some very bizarre unions, and another specimen's heart has the ability to jump off its location on his back and scuttle off on its own. He actually gets significantly nicer when it's on holiday.

Live Action TV

• One episode of Red Dwarf featured Rimmer the hologram 'accidentally' having another dead crewmember's arm uploaded instead of his own. Hilarious fights ensue.
• In an episode of Scrubs, Carla sees Turk's mole talking to her.
• On an episode of It's Garry Shandling's Show, Garry failed the written portion of his driver's license renewal test. Upset with his brain for being so stupid, he hooks a camera up to his TV and points it into his head so he can see his brain. The screen reveals a fat guy (character actor Stuart Pankin) lying in a hammock, who berates Garry for not challenging him enough, and they make a deal with each other: Garry will stimulate his brain more, and the brain will work with him. While they have this conversation, other body parts come to visit the brain, including a short, bald man referred to as "Mr. P" (pancreas) and his larynx (Dave Coulier), with whom he argues.

Larynx (Dave Coulier doing a spot-on Garry Shandling impression): Hi, Garry!
Garry: Is that my voice? I don't sound like that!
Larynx: Yes you do!

Newspaper Comics

• At least two Peanuts strips had various parts of Snoopy's body expressing opinions of their own—usually connected with jogging, which meant the feet said a lot. One of these strips ended when his heart commented, "Just remember, boys - if I go, we all go!" to which the feet remarked, "That's scary!" and another part said, "Shut up and keep jogging."

Video Games

• Used in an extremely disturbing fashion in Dead Space with the Divider enemy, which explodes and then the body parts reanimate in an attempt to take over the protagonist's body in the most disturbing way possible.

Western Animation

• In a Robot Chicken sketch, William Shatner's toupee goes out and lives a second life as a James-Bond style secret agent while he sleeps. He still hasn't figured out where the medals keep coming from.
• How about in Futurama, with Leela's singing Susan-Boil?
• In Ruptured Appendix episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko's appendix (and all his other organs) talk...and even have personalities. It turns out it's All Just a Dream, though.