Dancing Audrey - During the 2006 advertising season, The Gap clothing company sponsored a TV ad that featured images of actress Audrey Hepburn taken from the 1957 movie "Funny Face" where she danced about in a black pants suit. In the film, Audrey Hepburn plays Jo Stockton, a highly intelligent but socially awkward book store clerk who is chosen by a high society fashion photographer named Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) to become a model.

Reluctantly agreeing to the make-over, Jo travels to Paris for the photo shoot. While in the City of Lights, Jo escapes to a smoked-filled subterranean café packed with Bohemian philosophers and poets. A short time later, Dick hunts Jo down and lectures her on the responsibilities of being a model. It is at this point The Gap commercial snips a scene out of the film and manipulates it with computers.

The commercial starts as a perturbed Jo, who'd rather hang out
with a bunch of beatniks than prance about as a model, says to an off-screen Dick Avery, "I rather fell like expressing myself now. I
can certainly use a release." Then Jo jumps from the movie scene into a large sepia-toned void where her original movie dance sequence is digitally manipulated to create a new sequence filled with morphing kaleidoscopic images.

At the end of the dance sequence, Jo jumps from the sepia-toned area back into the movie scene. The words "It's back" overlays the
screen followed by the phrase "The Skinny Black Pant." The ad's music track featured the song "Back in Black" by AC/DC.

TRIVIA NOTE: This commercial is just an another example of celebrities from the past being used in products that in real life they may not have endorsed, but because their image is captured in celluloid, they can be sold to the highest bidder and plopped into a digital world filled with advertising slogans and characters that sometimes detract from their pop culture icon status.

Other recent examples of past celebrities being used as fodder for TV ads include:

• Groucho Marx, Cary Grant and Gene Kelly with Paula Abdul in "Dance" (Diet Coke)

• Humphrey Bogart and Louis Satchmo Armstrong
  with Elton John in "Night Club" (Diet Coke)

• John Wayne in "John Wayne" (Coors Light)

• Steve McQueen in "McQueen" (Ford Puma)

• Fred Astaire "Dirt Devil" (Dirt Devil)

• Jackie Gleason and Art Carney "The Honeymooners" (Braun Handblender)

• Judy Garland "Oz" (Federal Express)

• NBC All-Star Vince Carter of the Toronto Raptors confronted with real Steven Spielberg Jurassic Park raptors in "Raptor vs. Raptor" (Gatorade)

• Lucille Ball, Vivian Vance, Cary Grant, Jackie Gleason, cast of BONANZA with Shaquille O'Neal in "Set Piece" (Pepsi)

• And, as of 2006, Dolly Parton with Elvis Presley in "Tennessee Roadtrip" where a scene from the 1967 Elvis film "Clambake" digitally imposes the image of Dolly Parton into the passenger side of a red 1967 Corvette Stingray convertible driven by Elvis (conceived by Memphis advertising agency Chandler Ehrlich for the State of Tennessee Department of Tourist Development).