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"Are you gonna go for it?" the young siren asks in her most come-hither voice. She flirts with a tall, dark-haired, middle-aged man, who responds, "This is crazy! This is crazy," as he jumps up and down, strips off his pants and leaves on his socks.

The scene evokes Eliot Spitzer at the Mayflower, of course, but it's actually a lot more innocent -- it's the latest spot in DirecTV's "Fourth Wall" series from Deutsch/LA. In it, former Sports Illustrated cover model Christie Brinkley bobs in a swimming pool, a present-day presence calling out to the soft and bumbling Chevy Chase of 1983.

A reprisal of the iconic scene in National Lampoon's Vacation, the difference here is that after old Chevy cannonballs into the pool, courtesy of the original film footage, the wet and chlorinated head of the Christie of 2008 turns to us and says, "What's crazy is not connecting your new flat screen to DirecTV… A man with that much HD is such a turn-on…."

As a commercial, Vacation is weirdly amusing and certainly will appeal to the non-PC male demographic. It actually looks less creepy than some of the others in the series, in which the modern-day actors appear to be overly made-up and caught in a time warp (which they are). Amazingly, Brinkley's face hasn't changed much in 25 years. Nor does her acting seem to have improved with age. So as re-creations go, it's a pretty dead-on combo.

As with the various iterations of Geico insurance ads, this long-running DirecTV series is one of those workhorse campaigns that not only really sells, but also connects in an entertaining way, regardless of the quality of the acting or the choice of movies, TV shows or sports moments that it reconstructs. The message is all about connecting your flat screen to "the most HD channels."

This campaign works because it's based on a much bigger, less utilitarian and more poetic connection. Chances are, if you somehow missed the real thing that it parodies, you still get the commercial, because over the years, the jokes have become part of our collective pop cultural connective tissue.

A true standout was the William Shatner-as-Captain-Kirk schtick aboard the Starship Enterprise. ("Settling for cable would be illogical," he says, as he passes Mr. Spock.) I also loved Austin Powers' Fat Bastard burring at Verne Troyer's Mini-Me "Come here, I'm gonna eat ye! Get in me belly!" (Troyer says, "This guy's crazy! What's even crazier is settling for anything less than 100 percent digital picture and sound on every channel…")

The "how'd they do that?'' part is the obvious attention getter in the series, but the reality is that the selling points are as meticulously interwoven into the script as the new footage is artfully re-created and pieced together with scenes from the original. (There's very little CGI involved, apparently.)

Although businesses like DirecTV and Comcast are in a Darwinian struggle with the constant need for technological innovation and sales growth, this campaign smartly capitalizes on something larger than utility -- the entertainment properties that are our culture's passion. Rather than feature a customer hugging a cold, hard dish (or the installer, as in the launch campaign), these commercials effortlessly connect us to the thousands of cultural jokes that have become our most valuable currency as Americans.

In the case of Vacation, the movie itself is a pastiche of all the road-trip comedies that came before it, and it certainly wasn't wildly original in any other area. A parody of the shower scene in Psycho was done by Mel Brooks a few years earlier in High Anxiety, and a running bit with Brinkley making her screen debut in a red Ferrari 308 GTS was obviously a twist on an idea used by George Lucas in American Graffiti.

The movie's director, Harold Ramis, also directed Caddyshack and co-wrote Animal House and Meatballs, all of which can be felt in Vacation. The screenplay was by former ad guy John Hughes, who went on to become the definitive depicter of teen angst with The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, not to mention Ferris Bueller's Day Off. (That comedy classic was also redone in this DirecTV series, although it's far more painful to watch Ben Stein, with his heavy pancake makeup and hair newly died black, attempting to revivify his role as the droning economics teacher.)

There's nothing really new in these spots either: The melding of old and new film goes back to Fred Astaire dancing with a Dirt Devil; and the idea of breaking the fourth wall probably dates to the Egyptians. (It certainly was popularized by Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, when Bogart steps out of the film to speak personally to Allen.)

Sadly (or not), the flat screen attached to the satellite with all the HD channels is one of the few toys that most adult DirectTV customers get to play with. They can put their family responsibilities on hold, sit back and enjoy. And linking that emotion to the larger concept of pop culture creates a comforting but much bigger feeling of home -- past, present and future.