Take Advantage with Sega – Perverted Ad or Innocent Parody? (NSFW)
There was once a time when game companies had the tennis balls to get away with something like this. This is an advertisement for “Davis Cup World Tour” for the Sega Genesis. There appears to be a young female tennis player holding up a copy of the sports game while simultaneously lifting up her tennis dress. Oops! It looks like she forgot to put on an article of clothing as well! Can you imagine the backlash if ads like this were made today? It would have exploded into a social media frenzy for better or worse.
So where did they get the idea to make this ad anyway? Did they just say “I know! Let’s advertise our game with the bare butt of a female tennis player!” or is this image inspired from something else? Well, it turns out that the image in the ad is basically just a “parody” of a famous image that came from 1976. Here is the source image where the “inspiration” came from, which was taken by Martin Elliott:
The “Tennis Girl” image is so popular, it has many parodies apparently:
Lego Tennis Girl by photographer Mike Stimpson
Kylie Minogue
Raving Rabbids, a more recent video game doing a parody of Tennis Girl:
Helen Flanagon
Identical twins Byrony Frost and Katherine Frost
Pink Panther calendar poster
Heck, there is even a sculpture based on casts from the original Tennis Girl model, Fiona Walker.
The original Tennis Girl image was so popular, the poster version of the image has sold over 2 million copies and is still a popular poster today. The original image has become more and more of a cultural icon over recent years. So when you consider the source the Genesis ad came from, does that give them a “free pass” to create the ad as “parody” or do you think they were just wanting to make something to strictly draw the attention of teenage boys?