Beer - it's what's for dinner

I'll confess to being a little dry tonight in the idea department, but even so it wasn't too hard to track down something good. Namely, vintage animated beer commercials.

Here's a Claymation one for Ballantine beer.



This one has bears having a pie fight for God knows what reason.



Best of all, here are Bob and Ray doing one of their Bert & Harry Piel ads for Piels beer. This was a campaign that actually put Piels out of business - so many loved the ads that they tried the beer, and unfortunately the beer was pretty lousy.



Bonus! If it's modern funny beer ads you want, here are the folks at Red Stripe (who make the best beer ads in the world hands down) topping themselves with an infomercial.

For all you artists and tradespeople

At last, I'm back in Holyoke, home of high speed internet, and I can make high-class updates to the blog. Better yet, I can check my email for ideas.

This one comes to me from my friend Allison in Nashville. It's a Canadian couple named Fred and Sharon Spencer, advertising their video company, and it has to be seen to be disbelieved.

Those thrilling days of yesteryear

Dan Rather once said, "An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger." I guess I'm no intellectual snob. Really, did a piece of classical music ever become so tightly entwined with any other fictional character?



Clayton Moore, who played the Lone Ranger, is unique among TV stars in his desire to be as much like his character in real life as he was onscreen, living by the Lone Ranger creed and rarely appearing in public without a mask. Even when doing this ad for Cheerios (and where can you find a cereal these days that will send you a gun for a couple boxtops and four bits?), he talked only of gun safety, nothing about those tasty whole grain oats.



Finally, here's a fantastic story actor/radio personality Jay Thomas told on Letterman about his encounter with that masked man early in Thomas's career.

Ronald McDonald over the years

When McDonald's first brought in a clown to promote their vittles, he looked nothing whatsoever like he would later.



Here he is in his more traditional form, doing battle with Grimace, who was once evil and had four arms, if you can believe that. (Note the young Jodie Foster.)



Grimace later became a lovably dopey good guy. Here's one from my younger days, when he lost his voice. The doctor part of this still makes me laugh.



This may be my favorite of the ads, as Ronald does his level best to stay fah-resh.



Maybe it was better in its original Chinese.

Speaking as a New England Patriots fan

PS - It's not all bad news - Will Ferrell's Bud Light ad was the best commercial I've seen in a long time.

Lynch and Obsession

The previous post shows highlights of David Lynch's directing career; what gets me about them is how I just can't look away. Clients should be salivating over the chance to work with him.

In 1988, post-Blue Velvet and pre-Twin Peaks, he did some work with Calvin Klein's Obsession fragrance that just blows me out of the water.

The premise: four ads, with four different authors' words read over them. Sadly, I can't find the Flaubert ad, but I'm not complaining at being stuck with D.H. Lawrence...



...Ernest Hemingway...



...and F. Scott Fitzgerald.



Wow, huh?

Brought to you by David Lynch

A long time ago, I began a series of celebrities-and-commercials entries with one by David Lynch. I haven't done any in a while, but Lynch has fortunately kept up the good work.

A lot of good work.

See, he's directed way more commercials than I ever would have guessed. The products range from perfume...



...to cars...



...to PlayStation...



...to pregnancy tests...



...to a damn fine cup of coffee with Agent Cooper.



There's more, but they deserve their own posting...

Good news - I can laugh again

Well, we had ourselves a good little memorial for Doug, and a lot of the stories we remembered ended with everyone laughing. It's good to do that and mean it.

To celebrate, I think I'll put up two of my favorite commercials from Saturday Night Live. They seem to be a little more lax about taking these clips down, so hopefully you can see these for a while.

First is the parody of the '70s ad that showed a diamond cutter doing his work in the back of a moving car.



Then there's this one. You have got to give it up for Stevie Wonder to agree to do this sketch (and yes, that is Stevie Wonder and not Eddie Murphy doing Stevie Wonder).

Christmas Catch-All

One of the great things about doing this all these Christmas posts is that there's so many good ones. Frankly, I should have started this a lot earlier. As it is, I'm putting up a whole bunch here with no common theme save 12/25.

Here's Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa, the best Christmas movie of the century so far.



Here's the stop-motion classic Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town - made freshhhhhh.



Here are some bad guys feeling the spirit of the season.



And here's Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo.

NOW how much would you pay?

The first really good Christmas gift I ever got for somebody was in the late '70s, when I got my dad the Auto-Cup from Ronco, which guaranteed no more spilling hot coffee on the long drive. (In the days before cupholders, a legit concern.)

Ronco, named for its founder Ron Popeil, was the company for gadgets in the '70s and '80s. Their ads brought the phrases "It slices, it dices," "set it and forget it," and "but wait - there's more!" to the collective conscious. And the zesty version of "Deck the Halls" that closed the ads was a great indicator that Christmas was close at hand.

Here are a few of their greatest hits: The glass froster...



...the smokeless ashtray...



...and the semilegendary Mr. Microphone.

You plug 'em, we plant 'em

Back before Paul Lynde was yukkin' it up on Hollywood Squares (like so)...



...he appeared in a whole bunch of movies and TV shows. Perhaps his best known is his role as the father in Bye Bye Birdie, but I want to give some love to this scene from Send Me No Flowers. It's a 1964 film where Rock Hudson thinks he's going to die, but doesn't want anyone else to know, so he sets about planning everything, including his final resting place. That's where Lynde comes in, as a cemetery director who just loves his job.

Take note of the line that would raise eyebrows once Rock had been outed.

Punchbuggy

Oh, I've got a treat for you guys today.

There's a guy on YouTube whose account has over a hundred retro Volkswagen ads. These are from when Doyle, Dane & Bernbach had the VW account, and got their points across with humor and brilliance. You can see all the ads in beetlejuice150's account here: I just want to show a few of my favorites.

Watch and learn how the Beetle is efficient with gas...



...handles well in the snow...



...and doesn't cost much.



Bonus: Perhaps the best ad to involve a funeral procession...



...and unquestionably the best to involve the "La Cucaracha" horn.

"Look out, Marshall Lucky! It's High Prices!"

Long before winning an Oscar for directing Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis was at the wheel for Used Cars, without question the funniest film about used car salesmen. Starring everyone from Kurt Russell and Jack Warden to "Grandpa Munster" Al Lewis and "Oh Yeah, That Guy" Dub Taylor, it was rambunctious before rambunctious was cool, and the box office sadly reflected that. Still, we're left with a lot of laughs and at least one scene that'll go down as one of the great pieces of film comedy.

There are two competing used car lots, and salesman Russell's doing his damnedest to keep ruthless rival Warden from controlling them both. One way to do that is by interrupting a nationwide address from President Carter with an ad that shows a cowboy destroying some of Warden's stock. Russell, far from the scene, is pitching woo and doesn't want the girl to see what's going on; unfortunately, they're standing in front of a wall of for-sale TVs.

And here's what happens.

IN July, peas grow there

Orson Welles. The name conjures up so many magical moments. The "War of the Worlds" broadcast... "Rosebud"... The Magnificent Ambersons... Touch of Evil... and of course, the stirring catch phrase at the end of this ad:



But there's a segment of America that knows him best for his outtakes. He's either plowed or blustering, and what comes out is strangely riveting, and not just in a "how the mighty have fallen" sort of way. Here he is staggering through another Paul Masson ad.



And here's his legendary "Frozen Peas" for Findus frozen foods. The audio is the real McCoy, but these are actors reenacting it, and brilliantly.



This clip has been parodied on The Critic, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain, which does it note for note.

Definition of "earworm"

Earworm (EER-wurm)(deriv. from German ohrwurm)

1. Slang. A song or advertising jingle that sticks in one's head, particularly an annoying one.

2.

The Best of MeTube

One year and 356 posts ago, I began sharing my favorite clips off of YouTube to you, my virtual audience. Today I'm going to share my favorite favorites of the past year. (Sadly, nobody submitted their favorites, so the mix CD prize will just have to go to me.) Sure, they're reruns, but it's summertime and time for reruns anyway.

In reverse order, tenth favorite to favorite favorite, here they are:

#10. The Temptations performing "For Once In My Life."



#9. The Moody Rudy toy.



#8. The Billy Nayer Show.



#7. "You'll Come One Day."

You'll Come One Day | Viral | SPIKE.com

#6. The Ball Buster Toy.



#5. Miami Bugs.



#4. The Hungarian sausage commercial.



#3. "Sister Ray" on Lawrence Welk.



#2. The GI Joe PSA parody with "The Motorcycle Song."



#1. Vader Sessions.



Let's hope there are some equally good clips to come for year two.

Short Attention Span Theatre 3

Yes! It's time once again to cram as many fun clips as possible into one minute, give or take! This time around, that consists of...

another classic commercial from the folks at Red Stripe...



arguably the best line in Dr. Strangelove...



one of those Smokey the Bear PSAs that used to scare the shit out of me...



an unexpected opinion from a very attractive movie critic...



a super-slomo raspberry...



Admiral Ackbar performing an excerpt from The Vagina Monologues...



and an acknowledgment of existence from Jeff Spicoli.

How awesome is Jack Black?

There's a big division out there as to whether Jack Black is a waste of skin or genius incarnate. I fall closer to the latter camp.

Here are a couple of early incarnations. First, his appearance in a 1982 video game ad.



And here he is with John Cusack and Todd Louiso, his costars and coworkers in the High Fidelity record shop. This clip comes not from the movie or DVD extras, but from the movie's website; it's the three of them naming their top five songs to make love to.



I'm thinking Jack deviates a bit from the script at the end, which may account for it being the best part.

We secretly replaced this ad with INSANITY!

Folger's commercials have been pretty good quality over the years - they put the phrase "we secretly replaced" into the lexicon, and the brought us the Swedish pitchwoman supreme, Mrs. Olson, who talked about Folger's being "monten gron, de riches', mos' aromatic kind uff coffee." (Actually, she was from Stanton, Iowa. Read more about her here.)

Even in their early ads, they showed vision - watch this one with an eye out for its film noiriness. (And how about that turnstile!)



But you know what happens. You get older, you try something different to stay on top. And what the Folger's people tried...

You know what, I don't think any description I could give could do this justice. Just watch it and thank the deity of your choice that nobody involved is you.

Here's to the crazy ones

I'm going to be spending the next few days visiting my folks, which means no new posts until Thursday. And when I return, I'll be moving away from Star Wars for a while. This'll be the last one for the month.

It's not that I've run out - there's the "Copacabana"/"Star Wars Cantina" song, the Brokeback Mountain parodies, the Donny and Marie Show take (I dare you to track that one down), Admiral Ackbar watching Sonny at the tollbooth in The Godfather and saying, "It's a trap!", and thousands more. It's just that the 30th anniversary proper is on Friday the 25th, and several days off takes away from the steam of the leadup. I've also got a lot of non-Lucasian clips I'm rarin' to post. Plus, as old juror number 8 says in Twelve Angry Men, "I think the point is made."

So I'm going to close with this, a mashup of the soundtrack to Apple's award winning "Think Different" ad and shots from all the Star Wars films. I think it's a nice way to go out. Hope you enjoyed...