TBT…

Posted on by May 5, 2021

A few more ads the likes of which we’ll never see again…

And this one from the 70s brings back memories of beating on the DEC terminal at work as we tried to solve the maze in the Adventure game. đŸ™‚

A prescient  ad??? From the 80s…

We had a lot of fun with a couple of these when we were kids… Until the adults found out and…shall we say a couple of the dads had a ‘slightly’ different reaction!!! Sigh

I wonder what we’ll think of the current ads thirty or forty years from now?

What ads stuck in your head from the past???

For me it was the Mean Joe Greene Coke ad from 79, and the 84 Apple ad…

Comments

TBT… — 28 Comments

  3. I always liked the Frito Bandito. Another commercial that could not be done today.

    • The sad thing is, the Mexicans in Mexico love the Frito Bandito and Speedy Gonzales. It’s our own idiots that are freaking out about them.

  4. “Mother, please! I’d rather do it myself!” From Anacin advert
    “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” from Alta Seltzer
    Then there was “Come alive, come alive, join the Pepsi Generation” which evidently didn’t do,well in China since it translated into “drink Pepsi, it will bring your ancestors back from the dead”, or at least the story goes

  7. Did the exploding grenade use greenie stick-em caps?

    I think we had them in our arsenal for war games as a kid

  8. “Plop-plop-fizz-fizz,” I remember. “Butter, butter, Parkay” also sticks in my mind, and the Wendy’s commercial making fun of the USSR (the Soviet fashion show ad). Apple’s 1984 ad, and a lot of the Calgon/ “Ancient Chinese secret, huh?” water softener commercials, for some reason.

    Oh, and unless you take Doan’s pills for your back, folding sheets causes back pain. (Carter’s Little Liver Pills were a bit before my time).

  10. All- Thanks for the comments, and some good ones! Gerry- Either the greenies or in worst case, a couple of reds stuck together… LOL

    Posted from my iPhone.

  11. The price of that terminal helps explain the popularity of Don Lancaster’s TV Typewriter and Cheap Video techniques.

  12. Try it, you’ll like it! So I tried it…
    Thought I was gonna die.

    I can’t believe I ate the whole thing…

    When it positively, absolutely, has to be there overnight!

    Just a few…

  13. Then back to verboten times, with cigarette commercials on broadcast TV.

  14. “We will sell no wine before it’s time.”

    “Chill a Cella.” (and it wasn’t bad wine, not great wine, but not bad.)

    Not even going to start tv show jingles… Got one stuck all the time from “It’s About Time.” You know, two astronauts in a landable Gemini capsule (with enough fuel to take off again and again and again)? And what we kids did to the jingle… “It’s about time, it’s about space, it’s about time to slap your face…”

    4 years old when I heard that and I still can’t get that damned earworm out of my head.

  16. 1. “Mama Mia that’s a spicy meatball!”
    2. “ANTHONYyyy-y!” The kid charges home because “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day” in the city’s Italian section. Way way back when SNL was sometimes funny, they did a spoof of this ad but set in Beirut, with the kid scrambling home during urban mayhem. At one point he asks his buddy with an AK to throw down some cover fire so he can dash across the street. “Oh c’mon Ma, just one more clip!” “NO Anthony YOU get Home THIS Instant!”
    3. Magazine ads offering surplus Army jeeps for $44, and bags of hundreds or thousands of green plastic infantrymen. Does anyone remember a good, honest pitched battle instead of it always being terrorists and drug criminals embedding amongst civilians?
    4. TV stations signing off to John G. Magee Jr.’s poem “High Flight,” respectfully recited to footage of that wonderous F-104 Starfighter.

    @Beans: A catchy jingle or TV opening theme can rattle around in your head for DECADES, even restaurants, furniture and appliance stores that are all long-gone…

    • And the test pattern card — the black and white stations had the more interesting pattern cards — between signoff and transmitter shutdown.

      Static filled ‘dead’ channels. Now TVs suppress that to a blue screen, if they even show the no-signal channels.

      Not an advert, but I remember my dad setting his watch to WWV’s radio time transmission.

  17. Wow, apparently I’m NOT the only one that remembers some of those…

    Posted from my iPhone.

    • I may still have the magazine add around somewhere or other. I’ll look for it and if I find it, I’ll scan it an throw it on the blog.

      It’s funny, but as a teenager I hated the 70s. Now, even though it looks like we’re going “back to the future”, I realize what an idiot I was back then. Great cars, good and great music and we still mostly had our country.

      I found a 79 Spit, 43k actual miles, always garaged and local-ish, for $4k. Darling wife vetoed that acquisition. She does have a point, I’m not sure we could get into it these days, and we we managed that, it might take a call to the EMTs to extract us.

  21. Free- Sigh… I looked at a Vette and had the same thought.

    Rickey- Oh yeah!!! đŸ™‚

  22. SWTP – oh yas… bought and built one of their stereo pre-amp kits(pre-amp – what’s that?…).
    Took it to a Macintosh dealer store promo and they tested it against one of their Mac pre-amps. The kit had a flatter response than the Mac. Much unhappiness followed, heh, heh.
    And during my first job doing 3rd party maint. on computers I had to deal with Compu-Serve, Nexus, and Lexis before there was an internet. (Lexis was a subscription legal-orientated service for law offices/lawyers.)