If you’re like most people – breathing, media-watching, and humor-loving – you’ve seen the new Old Spice Bodywash commercials.  Featuring the manly man charm of Isaiah Mustafa, these ads are sensationally funny.  Even more brilliant?  The use of social media to create nearly 200 interactive videos, themselves a viral sensation.

It all began earlier in 2010.  Early promotions of this new, hip Old Spice are borderline obnoxious but like the hilarious commercials we enjoy today, feature rapid scene changes as our hero assures us of his manliness.  Somehow – not that funny, even when Isaiah Mustafa rides a horse backwards. Then – brilliance:

Mustafa manages to be charming, naive, arrogant, hilarious, and gorgeous, all at once.  Now – this could stop here and we’d chuckle over the commercials for the next couple of days, then go on our merry little way.  But Old Spice got smart. They put Mustafa to work churning out dozens of responses to the Old Spice twitter account (@OldSpice) via YouTube clips.

Check out, for example, this one from a four part series to actress, Alyssa Milano:

While bigthink suggests this has all been a clever marketing ploy to attract women by combining Chuck Norris with the Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man,” I’m a little saddened to think this might all be coming to an end.  No matter – Isaiah Mustafa has been memorialized online at the Los Angeles Times, Forbes Magazine, Newsweek, and Jezebel.com.

Silver Fish Hand Catch!

-B.C.Bodnar