Billy's dead but ...

Billy's dead but ...

Did you think you’d be seeing less of TV pitchman Billy Mays just because he’s dead? Silly you.

Since his death, I’ve seen him pushing KaBoom with Oxyclean and a health insurance plan that covers, among other diagnostics, EKGs because, as Billy put it, “Nothing is more important than your health.”

Mays died in his sleep on June 28 at the age of 50. It turned out he had heart disease, though it wasn’t clear to me whether he had known that.

Besides the commercials, Billy’s also still appearing on a reality show on the Discovery cable channel, called “Pitch Men.” In it, viewers follow him and fellow TV product pusher Anthony Sullivan as they make commercials and audition inventors for new products that they can turn into millions.

One day this past week, Discovery, as a tribute to Mays, aired a full day of episodes of “Pitch Men.” I won’t say I watched much of it, but I will say it’s like the proverbial train wreck: Hard to look away.

In one particularly disturbing segment, Billy is filming a commercial for a new type of windshield wipers. Here's the setup: Billy aims a bazooka, that has been loaded with live crickets, at a car windshield and fires. The bugs are squashed in a nasty wad and schmeared across the glass. The driver then turns on the wipers and washer and the squashed crickets are washed away just like that.

It seems like a really useful product. I don’t know how many times I’ve been driving down the road when some jokester has fired a bazooka full of live crickets at my windshield.

In this episode, May’s son, also named Billy and twentysomething, is helping out. There’s a problem, though. Young Billy is an animal lover and is greatly agitated at the prospect of the cricket carnage. At one point, after the first take with the bazooka, young Billy hijacks the remaining live crickets and disappears from the set. Who knew Billy Mays would raise such a sensitive lad?

Eventually, Mays the younger returns with the crickets and the commercial shoot resumes. The younger Mays mutters something in an aside to the cameras about reserving some of the crickets so he can put them in his old man’s bed. (Jeez, hope he didn’t follow through with that.)

Marshall McLuhan said famously, “The medium is the message.” I think in Billy Mays’ case, the messenger is the medium. When I hear that annoyingly loud voice saying “I’m Billy Mays” and look up to see that trademark lampblack hair and beard, I know I’m going to be hawked something that I don’t want or need that is not available in stores, and that I can have it for the amazing price of only $19.95, and that if I call right now, they’ll double my order if I’ll just pay the shipping and handling.

And it seems that, dead or not, he’s going to keep on doing it for some time to come.