Vin Diesel's History Of Doing Weird-Ass Commercials

Action star, occasional musician, and guy who’s said the word “family” on camera almost as much as Steve Harvey, Vin Diesel is also a long-time advertising guy. While weirdly he’s never lent his star power to the fossil fuel and/or designer Italian clothing industries, he did make several commercials for Dodge, who apparently make the perfect car for both picking your kids up from soccer practice and evading federal agents in a maze of shipping containers.

He also appeared in a 2020 ad for a French scooter company that involved speeding through the streets of France while also, oddly, performing a full nightclub crooner routine – presumably because he’s been trying to persuade the Fast & Furious producers to let Dom Toretto go full Michael Buble for decades. 

But these examples were hardly the only times that Vin Diesel participated in the product-shilling business; back in 1995, a pre-Saving Private Ryan Vin landed a gig at a toy fair hyping up the new line of Street Sharks merchandise while wearing a leather vest and no shirt for some reason. Street Sharks, of course, being the ‘90s animated series about mutant shark-men who battle crime, but still wear pants, lest America’s children be scarred by the sight of cartoon shark dongs every Saturday morning.

And even before that, Vin Diesel participated in the instructional videotape “How To Breakdance” – which, judging from the resurfaced YouTube clip, should be immediately and painstakingly restored, then mailed to every school in the country. 

Of course, more recently, he showed up in a Fast & Furious-centric PSA for the power of the “da movies.”

 

Which, of course, became heavily-memed and parodied, but was soon, tragically, overshadowed by that damn Nicole Kidman AMC ad.

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Top Image: Universal Pictures