What’s wrong with your radio, Mr. Clelia?

Here’s a question asked in honor of All Souls’ Day: why are dead people trying to sell me things?

Asked point blank, the question sounds insane. It reminds me of Mrs. Clelia in Exorcist 3, the crazy old woman who hears dead people talking on her invisible radio. And yet more and more I notice that actors are showing up in ads despite their deaths years – even decades – earlier.

At first I was prepared not to object too much to the continued presence of Billy Mays in mini-infomercials. I admit I’m a trifle disturbed that new ones (or at least ones I’ve never seen before) are emerging and that they have far too many lines that are far too easy to make jokes about.

More disturbing, however, is the willingness of advertisers to deliberately use dead celebrities to plug their products.

This started several years ago when a dance number from an old Fred Astaire musical got re-cut to look like he was dancing with a vacuum cleaner. Steve McQueen made a similar appearance in a Ford Mustang ad, and John Wayne had a dialogue with R. Lee Ermey about soda (or maybe it was beer). If I were suffocating I still wouldn’t buy oxygen from The Duke even if it was half price, so that last one didn’t particularly bother me.

But now DirecTV, a company I actually do regular business with, is using dead people in ads. The overall concept of the campaign isn’t all that bad: scenes from movies are suddenly interrupted by one of the characters delivering a sales pitch directly to the audience. At least it doesn’t offend me when Naomi Watts takes a moment or two away from giant monkey clinging to extol the virtues of direct-from-satellite multichannel distribution systems.

However, the early days of the campaign featured a segment from Poltergeist. Craig T. Nelson as pitchman wasn’t a problem; there’s a difference between actually being dead and merely having a dead career. But Heather O’Rourke is also in the ad. She doesn’t say anything, not even her famous “They’re here” line. Still, it was creepy.

I objected at the time, but only within the confines of my own living room. Some critics were more vocal, which should have put DirecTV on notice that the dead celebrity element was at least potentially a source of bad publicity.

Lesson not learned. Recenty the company has been running another ad in the series featuring a clip from Tommy Boy. Sure, David Spade’s doing most of the talking. But Chris Farley’s in it too. This was a dumb thing for DirecTV to do. But what really floored me was that Spade would go along with it. He and Farley were by all appearances friends. Seriously, David, how badly do you need money? Maybe we could take up a collection. Or better yet, why don’t you go back to doing your talk show? It was actually entertaining. And considerably lighter on the dead folks.