From the moment the advertisement appeared on the WoW Launcher, he was my guess for the spot. The blurred out head did nothing to take away from the “Walker, Texas Ranger” feel of the outfit (to say nothing of the kick motion). That’s not a horn toot or anything like that, just an observation. Honestly, I would’ve rather been wrong about my guess.
I’m all for Blizzard pulling pop culture icons into their advertising, even dated ones like Chuck Norris, Mr. T, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. The problem is that even Ozzy Osbourne didn’t look as “out of it” as Norris does in this spot. When he’s standing there staring at the camera, I feel like they just hauled him out of the old folks’ home ten minutes after the daily medication was handed out.
On top of that, it just feels dated to include him. References to him in-game aren’t nearly as common as they were even just a year or two ago (this is not a bad thing) and on my servers when someone does try to start cracking Chuck Norris jokes they usually get buried by better one-liners or simply ignored. As other folks have suggested, Blizzard could’ve had countless people for this spot that would’ve been better and equally as “iconic” and I still would have laughed at the Gnome pummeling.
