"Fireball" from 1994 has always struck me as being the wilder, more flamboyant cousin of "Darren" , one of the earliest TAC campaigns in which we got to witness the horrors of a crash first hand. In just three years, you can see how emboldened TAC had become in their approach to onscreen carnage. Everything that "Darren" did, "Fireball" more-or-less replicates, but to a greater extreme. The set-up and structure feel markedly familiar, with four teens driving along a rural road, enjoying a moment of deceptive bliss, before calamity strikes, leaving no survivors, and the relatives of one of the dead are seen receiving the terrible news in an equally dramatic epilogue. On this occasion, rather than hitting the incoming vehicle, the car swerves and tumbles down a ditch, doing a complete barrel roll before coming to a standstill. We think we might have settled on our big harrowing consequence, when the driver, Mark, asks if everyone is okay, and we're shown a close-up of his unresponsive girlfriend, with blood trickling from her head, suggesting that she was killed during the impact. This is a particularly tragic outcome, given that right before the crash they were kissing and expressing their desire to not be separated. But as it turns out, the girlfriend was the lucky one; in an even grislier twist of events, the car suddenly combusts, incinerating its screaming occupants. It might be one of the most jaw-dropping spectacles I've ever seen in any campaign of its ilk. Honestly, it's a great ad, but it's also a shining example of TAC at their most deliriously excessive. "Darren" was fairly moderate it how it presented its pivotal accident, showing the moment of impact but immediately cutting away and leaving our imaginations to fill in the very worst blanks; the amount of dead, eerie space in which we were taunted with the knowledge that something terrible had transpired, but couldn't get quite close enough to see it for ourselves made for chilling viewing. "Fireball", on the other hand, gives us such an abundance of ghoulish imagery (stopping short at least of showing us the burning victims from inside the vehicle) that it ends up playing like more of a dark comedy. I don't think it was wholly unintentional either - as we observed in "Bush Telegraph", by the mid-1990s a hint of D&DWL-esque sardonicism was discernible in the TAC mix.
Not that the spectacle isn't also a sad one. Compared to "Darren", the participants in this particular doomed vehicle have a more pronounced sense of youthful innocence, opening the ad with some playful banter about not liking the taste of parsley, before discussing their future plans, both immediate and in the longer-term. One of the backseat passengers asks Mark if he's going help with the fence tomorrow morning, and Mark replies that he's already promised to help his grandad with the sheep. "Give my regards to Jack, then", his friend retorts (put a pin in that name, it'll come up again later). Mark's girlfriend confirms that she has decided to decline a job offer in Melbourne, as she's not cut out for city life and would rather stay with him. As they kiss to affirm their love, Mark nearly drives straights into another vehicle, only to swerve and pursue that other fatal route. Once again, distracted driving is the ill that sends our young protagonists hurtling to their fiery demise, but "Fireball" is not explicitly a warning against the perils of not keeping your eyes on the road. The closing duplet of taglines ("7 out of 10 people who die on country roads live in the country" and "Country people die on country roads") indicate that the campaign was rather designed to tackle a misconception among Australian rural communities that the vast majority of accidents on country roads are caused by city folk who were unfamiliar with the terrain. The characters' dialogue at the start of the ad (sans the parsley discussion) is geared toward establishing that these kids are well at home in the country, while also laying the ground for an additional twist that comes with the epilogue. In contrast to "Tracy" and "Darren", which were nominally about speeding and distracted driving but seemed to be making statements about the vulnerabilities of younger drivers in general, "Fireball" is more like "Bush Telegraph", in that what's ultimately implicated is the culture of a wider community. The assumptions of the older generation are taken down along with the brash carelessness of the young.
The ad's single most diabolical move comes with the transition from that horrifying crash sequence into our deceptively peaceful epilogue; as we fade to black, the sounds of burning are colligated with the sounds of incongruously buoyant whistling, a fiendish juxtaposition reminiscent of the uncanny cackling at the end of D&DWL's "Pudding" in how it appears to mock the calamity. Here, in a direct inversion on the dissonance in "Darren", the the accident takes place in darkness, while the epilogue happens in the broad light of day, suggesting a cheerful obliviousness to the blazing apocalypse that played out the night before. We find ourselves in the company of two farmers; they, much like the teens in that car, have no idea what's coming their way. One of them brings up a neighbour named Fred, who's had the CFA (Country Fire Authority) on his front paddock all morning due to a fire caused by a car accident. The occupants of the vehicle, four young kids, are all dead. His companion thinks he knows the whole story. "That's city kids, I bet. See, they don't know the country road." Until suddenly his wife appears at the porch, tearfully calling his name. "Jack!" Uh-oh. He is indeed the grandad that Mark had mentioned earlier. It's a powerful moment, although admittedly high on the melodrama - the final shot of Jack comforting his sobbing wife is touching, but I fear that her closing whimper of "Why us?" threatens to push us back into the arena of dark comedy.
Still, it's a question that TAC invites us to ponder. While "Darren" centred on the rupturing of youthful innocence - though we heard the mother screaming, the focus of that closing shot was on the grieving sister - the final emphasis of "Fireball" is on the older generation and its having to reckon with its own misguided perspective. Unlike the father in "Bush Telegraph", who was inducting his son into a culture that promoted drink driving, Jack's outlook is not linked in any obvious way to the fate of Mark and friends. There's nothing to suggest that he'd personally encouraged his grandson to think that nothing bad could ever happen to him on a country road. His only sin was in being quick to jump to conclusions. A parallel is, nonetheless, being drawn between Mark's unwariness on the road and Jack's complacency in assuming that nobody from his community could make the mistakes that might be expected of a visitor from the city, implying that both are the product of a culture that overestimates its own immunity. At the same time, the grandmother's cry of "Why us?" points to the cruel arbitrariness of fate, and in that regard it offers a message for more than just country dwellers. Don't assume that it cannot happen to anyone. For as long as these incidents are at a comfortable enough distance, as items on the news or gossip on the grapevine, then it's easy to dismiss them as the kinds of misfortune that only ever befalls other people. Until the day when it falls terribly close to home.
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