Hitachi exposes gritty urban life with new hard drive cartoon

The mean streets of America's cities have inspired Lincoln Steffins, the artists of the Ash Can School, Martin Scorsese and now the marketing department of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

In its latest cartoon, The Hard Drive is the New Bling, a young female extols the virtues of Hitachi's 1-inch and 1.8-inch hard drives amid towering, indifferent buildings in an inner city. A man with a boom box and gold teeth approaches her, but he falls down. She walks away with her dignity, an MP3 player, and a cell phone.

Educationally, it's not as deeply researched as Hitachi's last outing--Get Perpendicular--which defined the super paramagnetic effect. Get Perpendicular, however, was marred because the soundtrack lifted notes from ABBA's "Dancing Queen."