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Everyone loves a good tale of corporate mayhem. Here's a short version of this 1989 news story: Business blunders delight us in that we like to see the powerful with a bit of egg on their faces. The facts of this story aren't in dispute — there was such a commercial, it was shot in Kenya, and over a subtitle of Just Do It the tribesman said I don't want these. Give me big shoes in his native Maa. But why did this happen? And was Nike aware of what the man was really saying, or had they been caught flatfooted? Nike's explanations were contradictory: So far so good: at this point it sounds like Nike changed the script at the last second, that they knew what the fellow was saying but went with it anyway because this particular string of Maa sounded better to North American ears than an accurate one would have. Bit naive of them not to realize that someone in the viewing audience was bound to know enough Maa to get the joke, but still a far cry from unintentionally ending up the goat in this story. Another explanation from the commercial's director surfaced, however: Adding to the credibility of that language snafu explanation was this snippet from a 1990 magazine article: True or not, tales of inappropriate foreign phrases sneaked into films have been around for many years, as evidenced by this anecdote from the pen of M*A*S*H star Jamie Farr:
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