Yes, she looks so happy as she irons her life away for her family. Mary Alice would be so proud!

Last week in a conversation we were having in the comments section of one of her posts, Merby quoted the opening line to the classic Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons”.  I was able to respond with the second line, and then tried to figure out why I knew either line to the song since I am fairly certain I’ve never actually heard Sixteen Tons in full before.  It hit me that it was from one of those many compilation album commercials that populated the ad time on the airwaves when I was younger, so I went in search of that ad on You Tube since I couldn’t even recall any exact details about it.  When I found it, every cheesy thing about that commercial came back to me!  Lord, I must have seen this a thousand times back in 1989-1990….

Nostalgia is nothing new.  While I, and many of my readers in the thirty-something (or wannabe thirty-something) age bracket pine for the good old days of the 80′s and 90′s… three decades ago, the thirty-somethings of the 1980′s were longing for the days of the 50′s and 60′s.  And this commercial is chock full of nostalgia….

When the government didn’t shut down…

Mom! What is she doing with all of those chocolates?

Now that you’re in that swingin’ fifties mood….

Ah yes, it just screams the Fifties!  Records, hula hoops, sock hops, and of course, two fucking CD’s…

To drive home the nostalgia concept albums like this were designed around, for each of the ad’s feature songs, they had real old fogies from the 80′s burst into song and dance while in everyday situations.  While Milli Vanilli gave shitty lip-synching a bad name the very same year “The Unforgettable Fifties” was released, the certified middle-aged thespians going to town on the old ditties in the ad for Heartland Music’s four platters full of memories made not having to remember all the words look so epic!

Thank you, and God Bless!

For the first song, “Sh-Boom”, Heartland found these three out of work televangelists who probably travel the revival circuit as some brother act.  The brother in the middle is entirely too excited to be singing this song that 80′s children only remember from the awesome movie “Clue”, while the dude on the right seems to realize that by just mouthing Satan’s music, they’re all going to Hell in a handbasket and will probably have to give up one night at the brothel in an attempt to repent for their sins.

What could be more heartwarming than inviting mom and grandma along with you to help pick out some new lingerie?

A family shopping trip at some upscale panties outlet is the scene for this endearing rendition of the McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely”.  The chick on the right keeps up rather well with her elders, but there is no way she has ever heard of this song before, or the McGuire sisters for that matter.  She more than likely has a Poison cassette in that purse that’s hiding a snakeskin skirt…

Could you please just refill my wine before I forget to leave a tip?

For Dean Martin’s signature tune “That’s Amore”, we are treated to an annoying waitress who just got fired from The Waffle House but forgot to turn in her uniform as she serenades Bea Arthur and her date.  The guy is so far gone from the mickey Bea slipped into his drink, that the server from Hell has no effect on him, but Maude looks like she’s about ready to bitchslap the big mouth…

Who wants to squeeze the melons?

As far as my generation is concerned, “Mr. Sandman” is that 50′s sounding song they wrote for Back To The Future.  But our grandmothers used to get down to groups like The Chordettes all the time while shopping for those nasty veggies they kept serving and re-serving our parents until they cleaned their plates.  This one gets creepy once the grocer behind them joins in on the world’s worst flash mob.  Now I know where Marlene gets all those wild stories from…

Meet the teachers at Creepy As Shit Junior High…

Yes my fellow 80′s children, Bobby Brown wasn’t the only one who told us not to be cruel.  You may have heard of this guy named Elvis Presley, and he also had a pretty big hit by that title.  To sing this little slice of Skinny Elvis for us, we have Ms. Furburger and Mr. Happyhands from the special education department together for a duet.  These are the teachers you are so glad were forced into early retirement by budget cuts before your kids also had to put up with their sick asses….

Ma’am, this is the express lane. Ma’am? Ma’am??? Security to Lane Seven, please!

Here’s the song that got this commercial in the Retro Ad Tuesday spotlight, and where else to sing a song about how much life totally sucks than in the checkout line of a supermarket, where we’ve all spent many agonizing hours watching the parade of human stupidity in front of us.  You’re not the only one getting older and deeper in debt, bitch, so are the sixteen customers waiting on your slow ass to find your checkbook…

Prozac must be on the menu.

Ahhh, who couldn’t possibly help by smile and happily sing along to Doris Day?  Even the old folks in the back who thought Benny Goodman was the shit have to turn around and join in the lip synching fun.  Whatever will be, will be.  Put that in your free will pipe and smoke it, Rush…

The Enchantment Under the Sea Dance it is not…

Apparently by this point, Heartland Music ran out of money to pay whatever is union scale for lip synching actors, so they just ran stock footage of some old 50′s prom over Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa”.  Too bad, because it would have been cute to see this song being performed by a police officer and motorist during a traffic stop for drugs, or maybe by a group of mourners at Aunt Bertha’s funeral…

Sugartime starts when we get inside the house!

Oh wait, they found two more people on this earth who apparently remember the McGuire Sisters!  This charming couple cheerfully sing about Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, and sugar at supper time.  Ah, the miracle of modern medicine!  With Viagra, every time is now sugartime for them!!!!

Ice cream is never a problem now thanks to Polygrip!

To cap off this tribute to the decade of innocence, we have these two recent AARPers wailing over “Volare” while the ice cream they bought in an attempt to recapture a moment from their youth melts all over the place.  Notice there are 21 more songs they didn’t include in the list.  The commercial for every compilation album out there always had some number of unlisted songs to make it look like you were getting so much more than they could show during their allotted ad time they bought.  Needless to say, the 21 songs that were kept away from the singing dumbasses in this commercial are so thoroughly wretched or unremembered that they actually drag down everything else on the album.  It’s like buying some artist’s new CD based on one song on the radio you like, and then finding out the rest of the tracks are some of the shittiest “music” you’ve ever heard… completely ruining the whole CD.

What a bargain! And you get 21 MORE songs!!!

Since this commercial was aired during that magical time period of the late 80′s when CD’s were first starting to take hold, but records hadn’t totally been reduced to a tampon box in the attic, you could own this unforgettable collection on three different media!  Notice that “Compact discs” was so new, it hadn’t even been reduced to just “CD” yet.  Of course, this was also an era before corporations had this asinine idea that they should cleverly shorten their names to something that no longer makes any sense…

Excuse me, but have any of you seen the Federal Express truck? I have an urgent package to send to Kentucky Fried Chicken…

And thus concludes The Nest’s tribute to the compilation album of oldies but goodies.  Our parents may have been foolish enough to pay for shipping and handling so they could rock out all day long to the McGuire Sisters, but we can cut them some slack since back then they couldn’t just download music or listen to it on YouTube for the low price of $0.00.  Needless to say, our generation would never spend perfectly good cash money just to get our fix of the music we fondly remember from the days when we were rocking the parachute pants and dancing on top of police cars.  Well, OK, we totally would….

And 21 more bands you’ve never heard of before!

I’ll bet there wasn’t a space for this career choice in The Game of Life.

If you are following my blog, congratulations!  At some point in your life, you learned how to read!  Well, I guess you could only be here because you like looking at childishly cute artwork and internet memes I steal off of Google, but chances are if you made it this far in today’s post, you are indeed literate.

Have you ever gone back and wondered how you came to learn how to read?  It’s not really all that intuitive an exercise… going from sounds, to letters, to remembering all of the fucked up spellings of many of our English words.  How did we learn to speak English in the first place?  Fortunately, our brains are much more receptive to picking up language at an early age, and so we learn how to speak by listening to how our parents speak…

Mommy! The fucking bill collector wants to talk to you again!

And we learn to read by…. well, most of us were taught in school by something called “phonics”.  Phonics uses the sounds each letter or letter combination makes to help us understand and pronounce words, and back in the day, we were all hooked on it…

Yes, in an era when everyone from Nancy Reagan to Officer Friendly was telling us of the dangers of getting hooked on drugs, teachers everywhere were trying to get us kids hooked on phonics.  Yeah, it’s hard to resist the first time someone offers you a hit off of their digraphs, but we all know the rush we get from those consonants just leads to vowel abuse, shooting up schwas in dirty diphthongs that will make you completely incomprehensible to those hoping to make an intervention in your phonics addict life…

Hooked on Phonics worked for Ozzy.

Let’s take a look at the Hooked on Phonics ad I chose for today’s Retro Ad Tuesday, and look at the shady tactics that were used by the pushers of this literary crack…

She grew up to found a major automotive company… not bad for a phonics abuser…

The ad starts off with nine year old Kia, whose parents were obviously inspired by this commercial, displaying her awesome reading skillz that she picked up during her days of selling her body for phonics hits.  The first thing she tells us is that “there is no excuse for literacy….” wait, what!!?  Why would people need an excuse for being literate?  Are you still on a long vowel high there, Kia?  I think you meant to say “illiteracy”, but you are either a phonics failure, or your speechwriter is your evil little brother.

Brothers can be like that…

After Kia is done verbally ejaculating about the joys of huffing phonics, we get to see all of the hardware behind this wonder drug.  You get books, and cassettes, and flash cards, and probably even your own crack pipe!  And it’s accessible to three kinds of people!

Will it work on douchebags as well?

No child or adult should ever be without the joys of overdosing on phonics, but what about all of those remedial people out there?  The burnouts who sit in the back of the class and smoke more than just flash cards while they repeat the same grade over and over again until they get kicked out of school for being older than the teachers… Hooked on Phonics will break some off the home stash just for them as well!  Hooked on Phonics is totally inclusive in destroying lives one hard G at a time…

Better keep that phonics ghost hidden in the closet should you enter politics…

But that’s not all, you also get this nifty little kit to help you understand what you’ve smoked read…

Over 60 million people can’t be wrong, at least when a ballot box isn’t involved…

This reading comprehension program has been used by “over 60 million people”.  According to the latest population estimates in the United States, that means that 1 out of every 6 of my readers can better comprehend the gibberish I post here thanks to this very Hooked on Phonics workshop!  Wow, why were so many parents so eager to purchase this 12 step program for their future zombies?  Was it really that good at teaching kids how to read, or maybe there was another explanation…

I’m surprised Kia’s brother didn’t turn that into a 1-900 number.

Every Hooked on Phonics commercial had the same easy to remember number for ordering, 1-800-ABCDEFG.  And of course, they had to turn it into a semi-song every time.  Can you imagine trying to decipher this number after you’ve become hooked on phonics?  Abb.. uh, abkuhhh, abkudefug?  Your phonic-addled brain would flip out and start hallucinating about all those mushrooms on the Mm flashcard and Rainbow Donkeys on the Uu card.  In fact, if you are one out of every six of my readers, you are probably having terrible phonics flashbacks right now….

No, no, no! It’s just a miraggy!

At The Nest, we believe there is no excuse for literacy, and would like to take this time to thank the makers of Hooked on Phonics for resorting to a bad drug reference to convince us we really need to know about sounds in order to read the search warrant the police have shoved in our face.  But don’t take our word for it, or the words of a company who has the world’s most annoying phone number.  Here is what the testicular linguist Oswald Bates, leading expert on The Great Bowel Shift, has to say about this truly genital phonics program….

TV commercials offer companies a unique opportunity to visually demonstrate the awesome capabilities of their product.  A really good visual image can even become iconic, and itself serve as an advertisement for the product even when taken out of its commercial context.  Seeing a bored Maytag repairman instantly calls to mind the reliability of Maytag appliances.  A pair of hands extending outward assures us that we are in good hands with Allstate insurance.  An annoying guy with a drive thru headset is a good indication that we’re going to love his nuts…

Would you like fries with that? Who am I kidding, of course you do!

In 1980, the makers of Krazy Glue did a little 8 second demonstration at the beginning of one of its ads that it never lived down….

The image of the construction worker hanging by his hardhat that’s glued to the bottom of a steel beam became so legendary, that a drawing of it still appears on every package of Krazy Glue sold today…

Whoa, oh, oh, whoa, oh! I’m just hangin’ tough!

While the gimmick went down in advertising history, the commercial that is associated with this famous stunt is nothing short of a fucked up mess.  First of all, let’s address the annoying voiceover that accompanies the hardhat demonstration….

The first words we hear are “Krazy Glue, you dirty rat!”  This introduction makes no fucking sense at all since all annoying voiceover guy does after saying that is brag about how strong Krazy Glue is to hold this dumbass in midair.  What did Krazy Glue do to get called a dirty rat?

You glued my guitar case together, you dirty rat!

Those who are up on their classic movies recognize the well-known “you dirty rat” line as belonging to James Cagney.  “You dirty rat” is one of those uberfamous lines we so associate with one actor or character that in reality they never actually said in any film they ever did.  But it doesn’t really matter that Cagney never actually said, “you dirty rat” in any of his movies, because voiceover dude is quite obviously a James Cagney impersonator…. and a bad one at that.  It sound more like a bad Cagney imitation done by another well-known actor who was big in the 80′s…

Well…. Mr. Gorbachev… I’m going to get you….. you dirty rat!

Then there is the question that has undoubtedly lingered on the lips of every person who ever watched this commercial.  We see that Krazy Glue is apparently great at super gluing the top of that hardhat to the beam, but just what in the name of Sir Isaac Newton is holding the dude himself up?  Are we really expected to believe he is hanging on for dear life to that hat on his head?  And just how is his head staying in the hardhat in the first place?  I’m pretty sure if he were only being suspended by the deathgrip he has on that Krazy Glued hat, he’d probably manage to jostle that head out of the hat at some point in time… especially since the lid is hermetically stuck to the beam and can’t move along with him!  Something tells me that beam wasn’t the only thing glued to the hardhat….

The Krazy Glue Man later had to retire to a monastery and become a monk…

As if this commercial hadn’t already committed enough crimes against common sense in just the first eight seconds, non-Ronald Reagan impersonating James Cagney voiceover guy then takes over and in rapid fire style lists many of the things that Krazy Glue will work on.  Hell, if Krazy Glue works so well, one wonders why all the king’s horses and all the king’s men didn’t have any on hand when they needed it…

Help me, sir! Need Krazy Glue! You have all the ingredients you need to the left of me!

Now, I’m not the handiest person in the world.  In fact, I’m one of the least handiest people in the world.  So it’s quite possible I’m just a huge dumbass (I’ll wait for a few of you to quit laughing at that)… but I can’t be the only person in the world who hasn’t managed to get super glue to ever work on A SINGLE GODDAMN THING!!!  About a minute after I’ve used it, what I was trying to bond together has already come apart while my thumb is awkwardly stuck to my middle finger.  Super glue has got to be one of the biggest scams the consumer industry has pulled off on us outside of the need for bottled water.  If I tried to use Krazy Glue on any of that stuff they list in the commercial, you can bet the object would be back in pieces before I could even get the cap I permanently bonded to fingers back on the bottle…

The top storeh of the hour on the Twindaddeh News Network.

And maybe that’s why they zip through the demonstrations so fast… because the shit doesn’t actually work!  We never do see that Krazy Glue has actually permanently fused any of those broken objects back together in the ad… including the candlestick that is quickly “put back together” by a man who was somehow allowed to leave the house by his wife or mother with his collar protruding from his sweater.  Anyone who’s ever tried to superglue anything fractured like that candlestick was knows that the pieces just don’t slide back together as easy as Mr. Rogers creepy brother makes it look.  That demonstration was about as made-for-TV phony as those appetizing hamburgers they dress up with lipstick and spray paint in fast food ads…

Plastic surgery for hamburger models just leads to unrealistic expectations for common ordinary burgers out there.

If you think I’m being unfair to Krazy Glue and want to pick some up anyway to repair the knob that fell off of your cabinet, the chip in your lavish vase, or the crack in your ass… well, here’s a list of fine retail outlets where you can find Krazy Glue, if you should happen to wake up one day and it is 1980 again….

Can you guess how many of these places have been out of business for decades?

Shit happens and stuff breaks… and when it does, we here at The Nest are glad to have fine adhesive products like Krazy Glue around to help put them back together for about 1.3 seconds while creating the biggest mess possible, and sometimes prompting a fun visit to the emergency room to pry our digits back apart.  Thank you Krazy Glue for making our worst nightmare a reality, because heaven forbid we have to use something sticky that won’t turns our paws into claws, and which has been trusted the world over since the days of the caveman to put anything and EVERYTHING back together again…

Duct tape…. you dirty rat!

I feel a draft…

Humans are hairy beasts, just like any other animal.  Yes, it is all over our bodies, but it is most noticeable at the top of our head.  Most of us are blessed with a nice head of hair.  Unfortunately, most of us men are also cursed by the fact that at some point in our adult life, that hair is going to start disappearing and growing in more important places like our nose and our ears.  By age 50, most men are going to have at least some shiny space on top of their heads.  Some men learn to embrace their baldness… I have been thinning since I was in my early 20′s, and the solar panel on top of my head doesn’t bother me one bit…

Yes, this is really a picture of me. Don’t fawn too much, ladies…

There are those men, however, who do not appreciate the fact that most of their hair is now way down in the sink drain along with that lost wedding ring and Jimmy Hoffa.  There are a couple of solutions available to these men who value their vanity.  One, of course, is the always classy and fashion forward combover…

Always better than a bowl cut!

The other option is to actually do something to restore the hair to the frozen tundra.  One of the early institutions willing to help men regain their lost fur was the Hair Club For Men.  Their ads were all over TV in the late 80′s and into the 90′s.  Here is my favorite one which I saw countless times circa 1990:

These ads made Hair Club For Men President Sy Sperling a household name, with his famous boast that he was not only the Hair Club For Men President, but also a client.  This, of course, makes one wonder who Sy would complain to if he didn’t like the hair treatment he got from his own club…

You know, Sy, you could have saved some money and looked a hell of a lot better by just getting rid of that awful do hanging over your ears in both pictures.

Of course, the real star of the ad I presented was the Hair Club For Men’s lesser known Vice President Tim Paulson.  Not only is he also a client, but he’s one fatally FUBARed hair transplant away from the Hair Club For Men’s Oval Office.

Beware of Tim Paulson on the grassy knoll.

So we start out with the Veep, Mr. Paulson, stationed in front of a typical 80′s photo backdrop some Hair Club staffer stole from an Olan Mills portrait studio, telling us about how Hair Club For Men changed his life…

Balding gave me a mullet the natural way!

I’m sure all the Hair Club clients were told to look unhappy in their Before photos that were taken of them, but Tim’s there really takes the cake.  It’s almost like he was totally pissed off at the time he was posing for it, and the cameraman cracked some impromptu dirty joke to force a smirk on his face that he’s desperately trying to hold back.  It’s also interesting to see what Hair Club did for Tim… his After hair doesn’t really cover much more of his head than his Before hair does… it’s just fluffier.  1990 did see one last explosion of the big hair that was popular during the previous two decades. but men paying big bucks to have their hair surgically fluffed still doesn’t make any sense.

Tim was going for the Wall of Hair look.

A little later in Tim’s monologue, he utters a two word phrase that had never before and hasn’t since been uttered by another person on earth…. “objective bibliography”.  The pamphlet Hair Club will mail you should you call their toll free number has an objective bibliography, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.  If you are having nightmares about all those research papers you had to write in high school right now, that’s because the only time we ever worried about damn bibliographies is when we were writing these papers for school to ensure that we were citing the sources we used at the last minute to throw the damn paper together.  I did my senior term paper on baseball salaries, and luckily remembered to cite Sports Illustrated writer Tim Kurkjian in my bibliography so that he wouldn’t find out I snubbed his footnote in a class assignment and sue the nuts off of me…

This kid submitted a term paper without an objective bibliography!

After taking up the first half minute of the ad talking about Minoxodil misconceptions and objective bibliographies, Tim then yields the stage to utter creepiness…

It’s a proven medical fact that running your hands through some guy’s hair can lower your blood pressure.

Here we see some chick who may or may not be Shawn/Sean’s significant other running her hand through his hair as Shawn just sits and smiles while the tent gets pitched.  It feels natural, like his own!  I’m guessing Shawn didn’t receive any donations from Tufts of Love then, or got that “non-surgical strand by strand method” Tim mentions as an afterthought, which probably amounts to a pubic graft.

How much abuse is this guy going to stand?

Not content with just showing how cool Shawn’s hair is to paw at, this bitch next whips out a hair dryer and starts blowing those locks around!  Passing the hair dryer test has now earned the extra compliment that Shawn’s hair looks VERY natural!  Shawn never lets go of that grin the entire time he’s got that portable furnace blowing in his face, but at least now you can tell the grin is completely for the camera, and that deep down he’s about flip his wig (rim shot!) over this whole demonstration.

Shawn finally said, “Fuck this!” and got his VERY natural self out of there.

Evil creepy hair lady wanted to show how VERY BERRY natural Shawn’s hair looked when wet, but for some odd reason he was no longer available, so she had to steal Gerard here to show what a Hair Club weave looks like soaking wet.  Shawn’s loss is now Gerard’s gain… you lucky dog!  The next demonstration has her pulling the living shit out of your hair to show how VERY BERRY SCARY natural it looks!  Remember to keep smiling!

All your fur are belong to us!

Once Tim comes back on and assures us that no salesperson will ever call us (except for the telemarketers Sy will sell our information off to), we see the Hair Club For Men guarantee:

Something tells me that Shawn and Gerard invoked the guarantee, and their punishment was having creepy hair lady redo their procedures.

So if you’re losing your hair and are starting to look like your great grandfather, do what literally tens of men across the country did back in the day and call the Hair Club For Men.  Because it’s a club, it means you’re joining an exclusive group of people who enjoy having their hair fondled and ravaged by strange women who go gaga for how natural you feel.  Take it from me, Evil Squirrel, because I’m not only the Objective Bibliography Provost for the Hair Club For Men, but I’m also a client!

Torture me, squirrels!

They aren’t getting shit!

I’ve already shown before in past Retro Ad Tuesday posts that there was perhaps no greater breeding ground for assholey behavior than in commercials for breakfast cereal.  They say that most cereals marketed towards kids are bad for you, since they are chock full of horribly non-nutritious ingredients like sugar, fat, Red Dye #6, and whatever toxic materials the Chinese make those free prizes out of.  However, if I were a parent, I’d be afraid to give my child a bowl of cereal for fear it might turn him into a stingy old breakfast Scrooge.

Don’t make me gouge you with this spoon, Daddy!

In the early 90′s, Cocoa Krispies looked to capitalize on the enormous popularity of encouraging douchebaggery in its commercials, and rolled out a new mascot for its cereal… Coco the Monkey.  As cute as the name may have sounded, this simian made those flying sentries the Wicked Witch of the West had look like honor students.  Here was the debut commercial for Coco, and it set the tone for the many random acts of unkindness that were to come…

Coco swings through the trees, singing his little monkey heart out and taunting all of the other much more dangerous animals of the jungle by brandishing a box of chocolately cereal in front of them.  Then when they all corner him at a table, he still refuses to share his breakfast bounty with them… and they don’t do a damn thing about it!  I’m pretty sure if one of those wild animals was really hungry enough to want to eat a box of chocolate flavored cereal, they would also be hungry enough to chomp down on this spoiled brat.  If you don’t think he’s spoiled… how come he’s the only one in the jungle who’s wearing fucking clothes?

WTF? He shops at Safeway AND Abercrombie and Fitch… in the jungle!?!?

Coco is a pretty brave little monkey to think he can get away with his selfish act out in the wild with many bigger and dangerous creatures roaming about.  Perhaps it’s because he has an Australian accent, and we’ve already mentioned before how that instantly makes you uber tough!  At least, I think it’s supposed to be an Aussie accent… though it sounds more like a British person trying to sound Australian.  Whatever it is, it makes this monkey badass enough to try the “you can’t have my cereal, nyah nyah!” trick with a pair of poisonous snakes, the king of the jungle, a damn dirty ape, a polar bear way out of its element, and um…. some giant birdlike thing.  I’d like to see him try this act on the streets of New Jersey…

Where’s my fucking Cocoa Krispies, monkeyballs? You’re gonna be sleeping with the barracudas!

Despite his fearless adventures that make even Steve Irwin look like a girly man, Coco didn’t have a long career as the mascot for Cocoa Krispies.  After his numerous commercial adventures in the early 90′s, his appearances became fewer and farther between.  Perhaps this was because he finally ran out of luck and got mauled by a hooge poomah.  Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that kids weren’t eating Cocoa Krispies to begin with.  Who would want to eat a cereal that turns the milk in your bowl a chocolate brown color and reminds one of diarrhea?  Bon appetit!

Snap, crackle, poop!

Actually, the real reason Coco’s moment of cereal advertising stardom was so brief was because since it was first marketed in 1958, Cocoa Krispies has whipped through commercial mascots at a pace that would make even being the Cookie Crisp mascot seem like a steady job.  Spinal Tap didn’t go through as many drummers as Cocoa Krispies did cartoon characters…

First up was Jose the chimpanzee…

¡Hola!

Jose didn’t even last a year on the job, and do you know why?  Because the Latino population raised a huge stink about him!  While that may not seem terribly shocking these days, keep in mind we’re talking about 1958 here… not exactly an era associated with political correctness.  You have to fail utterly hard at designing a mascot to have it successfully decried as racist in an era when people were still drinking from separate water fountains.

So after Jose got deported back to Oaxaca, Cocoa Krispies quickly filled the position in 1959 with Coco the Elephant.

It’s Coco-LOSSAL! And the chocolaty milk tastes even better mixed with elephant snot!

The elephant either didn’t work out, or maybe just got sold to the circus because he was out the door in 1963.  That’s when Cocoa Krispies decided to turn to a compensated endorser who was already famous…

Mmmmm, these things won’t be exiting stage left…

After the creative geniuses at Cocoa Krispies failed twice, Kelloggs went out and hired Snagglepuss to sell the cereal.  That’s pretty much the definition of desperation when you are resorting to hiring outside fictional characters to endorse your products.

Apparently Snagglepuss began demanding more money to shill for chocolate flavored cereal, because five years later, he was replaced by… no, I am not kidding, a chocolate caveman.  At least he looks like a chocolate caveman.  You have to see this for yourself to believe it…

Ogg quickly became an advertising dinosaur, however, and in 1971 they went back to the elephant idea and created the ultra-lame Tusk.  Just thirteen years after the cereal was first introduced, Cocoa Krispies was now unveiling their FIFTH different mascot!  This is the kind of constant switcheroo you can only get away with when your target audience is kids, because every five years is like a new “generation”, and you can wipe the slate clean since the youngsters who used to follow you have now outgrown kid’s stuff in their teens.  It’s like the difference between being raised on Barney or the Teletubbies.

This way to the unemployment office! Lalalalalalalala…..

With the exception of the brief transition to the ever-irritating Coco the Monkey in 1991, Cocoa Krispies executives finally just said “Fuck it!” and went with something that had worked for their sister cereal brand for many years.  And so these guys have been the official spokes-elves for Cocoa Krispies cereal for most of the last 30 years…

You may have heard of us when you pour that milk in your cereal!

In the end, was it worth it for Cocoa Krispies to go to the greedy monkey Coco for a few years and capitalize on the proven maxim that bullying is the only way to sell breakfast cereal on TV?  Hell yes… because it gave me one more good topic on which to make my weekly Retro TV Ad post!  So thank you to the makers of Cocoa Krispies and all of those poor animals in the jungle who resisted the urge to lay waste to one of the most ill-mannered chimps outside of a Donkey Kong game.  We hoist our chocolatey milky spoons in your honor today, and vow to never ever share our cereal with anybody else in the world… no matter how big, bad, or hungry they may be…

We’ll teach you “Sharing is Caring” even if we have to rip your monkey face off your head and shove it up your ass!!!

Grimace, my friend! You’re looking more and more like a giant buttplug every day!

There once was a glorious day when nobody thought it was irresponsible for a fast food company to promote its artery clogging delicacies to children, and no funny looking restaurant with a drive thru handled this better than McDonald’s did.  For this week’s Flashback Friday, let’s take a look back at the wonderfully creepy world that was McDonaldland and all of its lobotomized inhabitants!

Let’s get you in the proper mood for this post with a classic mid 80′s ad featuring four of McDonaldland’s best known goofballs…

How in the heck did we find this so amusing as kids?

This is either a normal day in McDonaldland, or the start of a very bad porn flick…

Ronald and his gang of misfits were completely ubiquitous during the 80′s, not only all over the commercials we used to watch as kids, but throughout McDonalds restaurants as well.  You know how Mickey Dee’s has been trying to look all upscale and classy the last decade or so, even making their employees wear ties?  That so didn’t used to be the atmosphere at McDonalds.  Not only were they generally dumps where all the weird people hung out all day, but they used to have one of the most fucked up playgrounds in your town…

Much respect to any playground that has its own jail.

Here, you could bounce up and down on a Fry Guy, run through the guts of Grimace, make out with the Ronald McDonald statue on the bench, or lock yourself up in the Big Mac jail… wait a minute, what was up with that jail anyway?  It’s become the iconic attraction from the old McDonalds PlayPlaces of our youth, but there was no cop character in McDonaldland, was there?

And if there was… why was this petty thug always on the loose?

Come to think of it, who is this Mayor McCheese I always hear about?  I don’t remember him, yet his meat and cheese head always seems to come up whenever McDonaldland is mentioned!  Well, that’s because the McDonaldland we remember in the 80′s was much different than the McDonaldland your parents remember from the 70′s.  Not only were there a lot of characters we 80′s kids never got a chance to know, but even the ones who survived into our lifetimes were barely recognizable.  Check out this picture of Ronald’s old gang…

This is how you appeal to small children!

Holy fucking McNuggets!  And to think Burger King gets slammed for their creepy king mascot these days… McDonalds built an entire popular kids franchise on a recipe of creep!  There’s Mayor McCheese up there in the upper left corner, and there’s the cop, by golly, on the right!!  I’m not sure what Cap’n Crunch and Jerry Garcia are doing in the picture, though… but at least we have Grimace and Hamburg…. holy crap, what the fuck is up with Hamburglar!?!?  Geez, we always thought Grimace looked disturbing… Hamburglar was an absolute mess back in the day!  If you think this is starting to look like it was inspired by a bad LSD trip, well, there’s a good reason for that!  Here is what the entire McDonaldland concept was inspired by…

I’d be crying too if I were in the middle of that picture.

If you aren’t old enough to remember the classic McDonaldland characters, then you also aren’t old enough to remember the popular Sid and Marty Kroft kids show H.R. Pufnstuf.  Heck, I’ve never seen it myself, but it is legendary in 70′s nostalgia, and probably one of the most memorable things to come out of the drug culture of the hippie generation after Woodstock.  So inspired by H.R. Pufnstuf were the creators of McDonaldland, that the Krofts actually sued McDonalds for not giving them credit and wound up being awarded one million items off of the Dollar Menu.

I was gonna pay the Krofts, but I got high…

This wound up being the major transition point between the old school creepyass McDonaldland, and the more colorful and slightly less creepy McDonaldland we all grew up to know and love.  After the lawsuit in the late 70′s, McDonalds phased out the mayor, the cop, the pirate, and the professor… which is why we never saw them in any 80′s advertising.  They kept Hamburglar and Grimace, but made each clean up their act first.  Hamburglar had to get plastic surgery and dye his hair, while Grimace had to lose his second set of arms (Seriously, he used to have four arms!).  They also had to quit thieving everything in sight.  We figured from his name that Hamburglar was a skilled ground beef thief, but you probably didn’t know that Grimace (nee, the Evil Grimace) use to take milkshakes from little kids.  Yeah, back before he was put through fast food mascot rehab, Grimace would bitchslap innocent children and take their milkshakes!

That’s actually more acceptable than his current role as a child eater.

And sure enough, despite getting rid of both the Mayor and the cop, crime in McDonaldland dropped like a rock in the 80′s… meaning McDonaldland was obviously one of the most corrupt places on the planet.  Grimace became a loveable big buffoon, and the Hamburglar became some goofy kid in a Zorro costume who could only say “Robble Robble!”  Ronald carried on as the clown who tied everything together, and the Fry Guys were… well, they kept being whatever the hell they were supposed to be.

I can’t tell if that orange one is Clyde or Sue.

To help promote their menu items that McDonalds considered to be some loose form of breakfast food, Birdie the Early Bird was brought on in the 80′s and became one of the major characters.  She was clumsy and kinda stupid, a lot like the other inhabitants of McDonaldland.  I wonder if they ever had the set tested for lead paint?

Hurry up! It’s almost 10:30AM, and I’ll turn into a pumpkin!

While the old regulars were out in the PlayPlace rusting in the rain, the new gang was adorning our Happy Meals for much of the 80′s and 90′s.  Sadly, McDonalds pulled the plug on the crew about 10 years ago, focusing instead on more adult advertising.  Ronald McDonald lives on… it is kinda hard to kill off the icon most associated with your franchise.  But sadly, Grimace, Hamburglar, Birdie, the talking McNuggets, and all the rest of the remnants of bad acid flashbacks have been banished to rot for all eternity in a decommissioned Big Mac jail.

Don’t let Grimace drop the soap, kiddies…

Kids gotta eat unhealthy too, so The Nest offers up a big, greasy salute to McDonalds for helping kids steer their parents to the Golden Arches through the use of some of the most ingeniously designed culinary villains of all time turned special education rejects.  It doesn’t matter that we don’t know what Grimace was supposed to be or that the Fry Guys looked like walking hairy testicles, we just knew it translated into the desire for Happy Meals and cheap plastic toys.  Thank you Mickey Dee’s for all of the memories and nightmares your gang of ragtag McPimps brought into our lives, and don’t worry about what those evil Health Nazis may think… you can Super Size us any day!

OMG! This…. is…. awesome!!!

Seven score and ten years ago, long before our government thought it was cool to fight wars way on the other side of the world, our forefathers met on the battlefields in our very own country as a nation divided.  The Yankees to the North, and the Rebels to the South.  Millions of lives were lost, countless families were destroyed, and many cities reduced to ruins in the four year clash known as the Civil War… easily the bloodiest era in the history of the United States.  To show that those brave men who fought for the Union and the Confederacy 150 years ago did not die in vain, we have forever memorialized these heroes in monuments, cemeteries, and of course in collectible chess sets.

Yes, chess sets…

Back in the day before eBay became the world’s largest marketplace full of useless garbage, The Franklin Mint was flooding the airwaves with commercials for the most ridiculous junk that had collectors everywhere paying obscene amounts of money for something they’d probably end up being too embarrassed to show off to anyone…

Yeah… I should talk.

In this week’s Retro Ad Tuesday, we see the infamous Civil War chess set The Franklin Mint advertised back in the 1980′s.  Nobody wants to pay more than Mecca prices for some mass produced junk imported from China, so right off the bat, The Franklin Mint wants you to see just how detailed and finely crafted this set really is.  Seriously, look at the careful work these illegal immigrants fine artisans are putting into the pieces for this set!

You can make out the curvature of Robert E. Lee’s cannonballs.

And yes, The Franklin Mint carefully researched each of the men whose likenesses they were stealing for this set… General Jeb Stewart’s ostrich plumed hat is there, William Tecumseh Sherman’s spinning bowtie he wore to crack up the troops is carefully etched out, even Ulysses S. Grant’s bottle of hooch is carefully stowed away in his back pocket.  These pieces couldn’t be more authentic if they sprang to life and started shooting at each other from across the board.

It doesn’t get more authentic than this…

By now, you must be practically salivating over the chance to get your hands on this remarkable chess set!  You’d be the envy of your chess club and the most popular nerd on the block!

Except for the bastard who has that Vulcan chess set…

Well, just hold your knights, everyone!  The Franklin Mint has a unique way for you to collect your chess set while still being able to pay for slightly less important things in your life, like the rent and the electric bill.  They will send you two pieces every other month for the super low cost of $17.50 per month!  That’s so affordable, you’ll barely even notice that you also have to pay 50 cents shipping and handling plus any sales tax each month along with that princely per piece sum!  But what’s truly amazing is that it will only take you 32 months to collect all 32 Civil War chess pieces… meaning that game you’ve been waiting to challenge your dog to will have to be put on hold for about 3 years…

Or 21 years for your poor dog…

Of course, the 3 year wait doesn’t really matter, because nobody in their right mind is going to use a chess set they paid almost $600 for to actually play games with.  You can pick up a cheap plastic set from a discount store for a few bucks if you’re itching for a game that bad.  And this is what The Franklin Mint and its ilk specialized in… selling practical things that were so expensive, in reality they had no practical use at all other than as proof that you are a hoarder.

The Bradford Exchange made a fortune selling plates that nobody would dare eat off of…

No matter how much Elvis Presley himself might appreciate someone eating a sloppy joe off of one of his plates, you probably wouldn’t get two and a half times the purchase price for your plate in the future after it got chileh stained…

Unless Elvis wiped his forehead with it…

While we admire the collectors out there in the world who aren’t afraid to accumulate a huge stash of something particular to them that others might find a bit odd, we do not recommend paying large sums of money to companies who manufacture collectible merchandise with the sole purpose of it being collectible merchandise with potential increased future value.  In all likelihood, you will be long dead before anything you bought from one of these companies would truly be worth your while to resell.  And anyway, the best treasures are the accidental things that have unexpected great value… whether that value is monetary or merely sentimental.

Collecting should start with the heart…

Nevertheless, today we here at The Nest tip our confederate caps to the people at The Franklin Mint for turning an ugly and bloody chapter in American history into a way to pad their war chests through suckers collectors who will gladly hand over large sums of mad money for something they will never be able to use properly.  We will continue to help drive the economy by building up demand and putting artificial value into the strangest things.  And regardless of cost, we will never be afraid to wave our collector’s freak flags and show off our awesome and priceless junk swag to the world!

Meesa scored!!!!

Take this filth and give it to the dog!

I like to talk about my favorite ad campaigns from the past that kinda slipped through the cracks of people’s memories on Retro Ad Tuesdays.  The internet generally has a better memory than most people do because of the vast warehouse it has become of information from all subjects and all eras.  But there are times when even the internet seems to have a bad case of dementia, and in particular YouTube… where you can find music clips from just about every video game ever made, episodes of TV shows that the networks would take down if they knew about them, and some of the stupidest videos you can ever imagine made by people who suffer from felony boredom.

I should talk…

I had long planned what my featured commercial for the NYE edition of Retro Ad Tuesday would be, the 1995 ad for Korbel sparkling wine champagne in their famous “The Champagne’s Not Korbel!” campaign that featured the year-end countdown in Times Square.  But I never actually checked YouTube to make sure the video for it was there…  I mean, how could it not be?  That delightful campaign was well loved and much parodied in the 90′s, and surely YT was littered with ads from its reign on the airwaves…

Nothing here but us possums!

Imagine my utter shock when I not only didn’t find the New Years Eve Korbel ad, but really ANY ads from the heart of their ‘The Champagne’s Not Korbel!” era!  I did find just one, which gives the basic formula behind each of the commercials Korbel aired in this campaign I loved so much…

At the beginning of each ad, you saw people celebrating with champagne… having a good old time… whether it be at a wedding, in Times Square, in the gutter, wherever people would normally drink champagne.  In the midst of the good times, someone would note rather starkly that the champagne was not Korbel… and that’s when things would all totally go to hell.  In the ad above, the best man goes from making a wonderful toast to the couple, to slandering them for being so cheap and tasteless in their choice of alcohol for the big day.  There was even one spot where some guy about to get lucky drinks the champagne out of his girlfriend’s shoe, only to spit it out when he finds out the champagne wasn’t Korbel!

That’s a good way to get athlete’s mouth, dumbass…

Shouting out that the champagne was not Korbel was the surefire way to get your ass kicked be the life of the party back in the mid 90′s.  With Bartles & Jaymes and Orson Welles out of the picture, Korbel undoubtedly had the best ads for non-beer alcohol sector on TV in the entire Clinton decade.  But either not enough VCR’s were recording them, or there’s a conspiracy afoot to keep the cork on anyone ever thinking about this campaign again.

We must keep Zima on top as the best 90′s drink!!!

So back to the New Years Eve commercial… it starts with stock crowd shots from a past Times Square celebration.  Everyone is counting down to the big ball drop… but when they get towards the end, someone shouts out the magic words!

The champagne’s not Korbel!!! We must fire the butler!

And guess what happens…. instead of counting down, the crowd starts counting up!!!  And the ball… it starts going back up the pole!  Absolutely classic!!!  An ingenious idea!!!

And I had thought of it first….

Someone call my attorney!

Back in the summer of 1994, with nothing to keep myself occupied since I was such a social outcast, I began writing a bunch of commercial parodies.  I always wrote parodies of pop culture stuff when I was bored, but this time I was actually writing to film them.  I grabbed the camcorder (one of those clunky models that were popular 20 years ago) and hired the only three actresses I could find (my three youngest sisters), and we had a ball recording all of these corny ads I came up with.  It’s just possible that VHS tape still exists at my parents’ house too, and if it does, it is video proof that I thought up of the entire concept of that Korbel ad a full year and a half before they began airing it in 1995!  Complete down to the count-up and the ball (A whiffle ball on a string with 1994 written on it in marker) being pulled back up the laundry line pole by an off camera sister.

Damn you Korbel!!!!

Take THAT, you no good sparkling wine!!!

Oh well, that’s the way it goes.  No matter how neat of an idea you think you may have, someone’s probably already thought of it as well, or will cash in on it while you sit on your ass and shoot commercials with your sisters.  So on this lovely final day of 2013, The Nest would like to pop open the bubbly and give a hearty toast to the champagne of sparkling wines, Korbel.  Thank you for your entertaining and hilarious commercials, and….

Errrrr, nevermind.  There will be no toasting today!  Good night everybody…

Evil Squirrel’s Nest signing off for 2013!  Have a Happy New Year everyone!

I’ve mentioned in a previous Retro Ad Tuesday how difficult it is to properly advertise products of a rather sensitive nature.  Feminine hygiene products in particular are a delicate subject to be bringing up for a television audience.  Some ad execs boldly confronted the issue head on, much to our awkward amusement.  Others decided that subtlety was the way to their target audience’s toiletry bags…

Take, for instance, the curious way that Tampax advertised its line of tampoons tampons in this classic ad from around 1999…

What message is this commercial really trying to tell women out there?

I was like totally corked up when we did all that dancing and flipping around out there today, Bobbi Sue, and I never felt a thing!  Except the opposing quarterback’s hand on my ass.,..

Or maybe Tampax gives you magical powers…

Here… put this in and you’ll be able to dance like my daughter down at the strip club!

Or perhaps tampoons are just evil jokesters like Kilroy and Captain Morgan….

You dirty rag!!!

Regardless of what Tampax was trying to sell in this ad, you have to really feel bad for almost everyone involved in it.  The Grambling State dance team, for starters, has to be a little creeped out by the fact that they were just shown on TV screens across the country in a commercial where the ad itself forces the viewer to assume that at least one of them is actually dancing to that old ragtime tune.  Or maybe it’s supposed to be a guessing game!  Gather up the kids and Grandma for the most fun you can have while watching TV!  First one to guess which girl has the cork wins a lifetime supply of FDS and the official Tampax Was There home game…

34% of the audience is a winner!

Then there’s the marching band…. poor guys.  That’ll make Daddy proud… their son went off to college to pursue their dream of starring in a tampon commercial.  I don’t even think freshman hazing could come up with a more cruel fate than these poor horn blowers and drum liners now have to live with for the rest of their lives when their friends and co-workers find this ad on The Nest YouTube…

And I’ll bet Tampax didn’t even pay them for their tampon shilling…

And then there are the men whose music made us want to get up and dance… at least  until the thrilling climax when we found out just what this commercial was actually advertising.

It was the white guy’s idea to do this ad… I swear!

The Dazz Band had a rather prodigious career in the R&B music business during the 80′s and 90′s, but to the public at large, they are essentially nothing more than a one hit wonder.  And that one hit was the song used in this commercial… “Let It Whip”, which reached #5 on the US Hot 100 back in 1982.  I was completely unfamiliar with this song when I first saw the commercial, so you can imagine what I thought the first time I heard “Let It Whip” play on the radio during one of those disco music marathons that were popular around the turn of the millennium…

Golly, Mom!!! Come quick!!! It’s The Tampax Song!!!!

Yes, I have seriously always thought of “Let It Whip” as “The Tampax Song” every single time I have heard it played in the last 15 years.  I know the members of The Dazz Band probably thought it would be easy money to let Tampax use their song in a commercial selling feminine hygiene products… but seriously, did anyone in the group think of what this was going to do to their legacy?  Can you imagine The Dazz Band doing one of those retro concerts at a casino or state fair, and some redneck in the audience holding up a cigarette lighter shouts out…

Could you play The Tampax Song!?!?!?

Given the number of lives this commercial ultimately ruined, one can only hope Tampax sold a hell of a lot of tampoons thanks to the exposure brand awareness they got from this ad.  But regardless of how well the sales of corks were flowing, The Nest would like to take this opportunity to salute everyone who was involved in one of the greatest WTF ads in the history of stealth advertising.  While your embarrassment may be worse than a case of toxic shock syndrome, at least your misery can capture a heavy flow of company…

There are advantages to living alone…… loser!

We’re just five days away from the most overrated spectacle humans have ever invented.  Super Bowl Sunday has practically become a secular holiday in America, bringing people of all walks of life together for unhealthy parties, pregame analysis overload, overproduced commercials, and…… um, oh yeah.  Some might even pay attention to the game on the field.

It’s dog eat dog out there, and the fans are all waiting for you to call a timeout so they can see the next Bud Light ad…

Did I mention overproduced commercials?  I’m on record numerous times on this blog complaining about the hype that goes into the Super Bowl ads each year.  I am a commercial connoisseur who can appreciate an ad that is clever, funny, and even warped.  Alas, those kind of commercials have been few and far between for a while on Super Bowl Sundays.  How can this be when advertisers now target Super Bowl Sunday for their best ads that will get people talking and be well worth the obscene amount of money it costs to buy precious Super Bowl space?

Is that Abe Vigoda? I thought he died 40 years ago!

The problem is that they try too hard.  Good ads, the ones that stand the test of time, aren’t carefully crafted and test marketed and polished and overwrought with celebrities of all status.  It’s just a good idea that is thrown out there and happens to resonate with the people when they least expect it to.  We come in to the Super Bowl expecting to see ads that will blow us away… and while that works for many people out there (See: Summer Blockbuster Movie), I want my hilarity and adorable quirkiness in a more everyman and unexpected form.  Most of the ads I feature here that I fondly remember weren’t trying to win Clio Awards or compete for the honor of being the best commercial to air during the most watched television event of the year when they were developed.  They were just made, and turned out to be memorable…

Accidental brilliance is brilliant in itself.

With all that said, I am going to honor what is by far not only my favorite Super Bowl ad of all time, but what might very well be the funniest and most cleverly written commercial in the history of words from our sponsor.  This ad was for one of the many dotcom sites that around the turn of the millennium was vying for consumer dollars that at that time were still largely being spent off the budding internet.  This commercial first aired during Super Bowl XXXIV on January 30, 2000…

I can watch this commercial a million times and still laugh every single time I see it.  It’s just so unexpected, and surreal… and the acting is spot on… played straight up serious and deadpan!

These doctors have probably seen patients come in with possums up their rectum… but nothing can prepare you for seeing money coming out the wazoo…

While the ad is supposed to highlight E*Trade’s low commission policy as a superior alternative for those who aren’t well off enough to afford the high fees of more established brokers, one can’t help but notice it’s also a nice satire on the state of the health care industry as well.  After all, as soon as the one doctor is informed that they have a patient with money coming out of the wazoo, he instantly skips the normal 20 hour ER wait and gets transferred to a private room.

Out of the way, lowlifes! This nurse absolutely makes this commercial!

And of course, when the man’s wife is asked if he has health insurance, the doctor overhears and says, “Insurance?  He’s got money coming out of the wazoo!”  For those who want to complain about Obamacare, you can blame this ad for bringing to light this horrible healthcare injustice that existed between those with money coming out of the wazoo, and those who only have poopoo and corn coming out of the wazoo….

Who clogged up the john with all of these silver dollars?

This commercial is such a classic, that I can even forgive E*Trade for the later travesty that was that #&@* #@&* @#^&* annoying baby…

Don’t hate me because I’m cute, Baby Squirrel!

So, whether you’re looking forward to the game, the ads, or just the booze… we here at The Nest would like to wish everyone a happy and prosperous Super Bowl Sunday, or whatever other sports holiday you choose to observe.  While everyone is pondering whether Peyton Manning will match his sucky brother’s championship ring collection, whether Richard Sherman will be able to keep his mouth shut, or how hilarious it will be when the Super Bowl has to be played in a blizzard… I will be thinking of more important issues, like what will the logo for Super Bowl 88 played in 2054 look like?

How did the Romans put up with this?

Correspondence schools never seem to get BCS bids…

Matchbook Cover University is a fictional institution of “higher learning” invented by some of us over on my message board to mock those schools that advertise how easy it is to get a diploma in your spare time by sending them a little money.  It was meant in particular for one member of our board who seemed so damn proud of his new “degree” he got that he no doubt probably had to print off of a PDF file on his home computer.  Welcome to the world of classless education, which is particularly booming in these days of the internet connecting us all together so we can collectively slack off…

Don’t think I can’t see you on the other end of that computer screen, McFly!

These non traditional colleges were around even in the days before homework assignments were tweeted to students.  One of the more infamous institutions that did a lot of advertising back in the early 90′s when I was watching a hell of a lot of late night TV was International Correspondence Schools, or ICS for short since some of their alumni couldn’t spell words that big.  And to preach the good word of what ICS could do for high school dropouts everywhere who thought they’d never advance above fry cook, the school hired one of the most infamous TV commercial spokespeople of that era…

She wouldn’t need a sponsor if someone hadn’t stolen her lunch…

Sally Struthers is best known for portraying Archie Bunker’s daughter Gloria on “All in the Family”.  However, to commercialphiles like myself, she is also famous for wandering through the filthiest ghettos of the Third World showing off her well-fedness to thousands of starving kids whose last meal consisted of a possum who wandered into their tent and died.  Her bratty innocence and unmitigated gall made her the perfect choice to pitch the idea of taking college courses at home that no employer in their right mind would recognize…

How quaint that she asks interested viewers to get a pencil and paper out to write down the phone number since nobody out there had cellphones glued to their hands at the time.  “And no saleman will visit you!”  Damn, Sally, the days of the traveling salesman were long gone even in the 90′s!  At least it was the fun days before signing up for something like this would get us all kinds of creepy Google ads…

One Simple Trick would be a great name for a rock band…

It always amused me how many exciting and thrilling crafts were available to learn at ICS.  But if it really weren’t possible to master these trades in the comfort of your own home, they never would have been in business, would they?  Let’s take a look at some of ICS’s former students in each advertised field who became success stories!

ICS High School:

Sorry I had to skip out on cyberclass yesterday, Mr. KOTTAIR. I do have a note from Epstein’s mother.

Child Day Care:

Hey kiddies! It’s storytime in the crawlspace!

Interior Decorating:

Spread out!

Wildlife/Forestry:

Your pickanick baskets are all safe thanks to ICS!

Auto Mechanics:

GAWWWWWWWLEEE!!!!

Computer Programming:

Mental health will drive you mad.

Medical/Dental Office Assistant:

ICS got us off the street corners and cleaned up our lives!

Journalism/Short Story:

Sorry, Clark, I can’t go out with you tonight. I’m trying to track down Superman for a big story.

Dressmaking:

It was made by a proud ICS grajuit, Sugar!

Fitness and Nutrition:

You’re just in time for our workout! Nice XXXXXXXXXXXL yoga pants!

Art:

A total hack…

Police Sciences:

Police scientist, and part time umpire!

Gardening:

They both have a degree from ICS!

TV/VCR Repair:

Uncle Charley’s gonna get what’s coming to him!

Animal Sciences:

It’s not hoarding, it’s homework!

Firearms Repair:

I don’t see what’s wrong with this canon…

Travel/Tourism:

It’s only a three hour course. A three hour course.

Electrician:

D-minus

Hotel/Restaurant Management:

The shower comes highly recommended by AAA!

And these are just a few of the many people who had their lives changed forever by picking up that phone and calling Sally Struthers for a few textbooks!  The Nest would like to salute International Correspondence Schools, who taught us the value of learning a skilled trade on our own time, not some tenured, clueless professor’s.  So if you’re still stuck in some dead end job with no time to hit the local campus, ICS is just the place for you to pick up that degree that will look lovely hanging in your bathroom new office!  You too can become a proud Fighting Flint!

Close cover before drawing.

My humps! My humps! My lovely camel lumps!

It’s time once again for Retro Ad Tuesday Wednesday.  Yeah, I didn’t much feel like posting anything yesterday, so I let my weekly feature you all look so forward to chuckling to go undone.  Then again, now that it’s Wednesday, it gives me the opportunity to feature a certain not-so-retro commercial that really yanks my pet peeve chains.  If you haven’t figured out what it is yet by the voluminous amount of clues I’ve dropped so far, here it is in all of its save 15% or more glory….

I could dedicate this post to how the guitar picker commercials are by far my least favorite of Geico’s many different ad campaigns it runs…

Two of those mothers from Nashville…

But no…. it is, after all, Wednesday, so let’s use this not-so-retro ad as a springboard to one of my other features I sometimes run on this blog’s off days.

It’s time for this squirrel to enter rant mode!  And today’s rambling rant is going to concern the workweek… or at least what is perceived to be the workweek….

The Geico ad obviously works of the well-known cultural phenomenon of referring to Wednesday as “hump day”.  Why?

What day is it!?!?

Because in the traditional workweek that runs from Monday through Friday, Wednesday is the middle day… and thus, the day 9 to 5′ers get “over the hump”, as the coming weekend is now closer in real time than the previous weekend.  That means it’s almost time for TGIF, or Thank God it’s Friday!

Who let this damn camel in the laundromat?

And Monday… oh dear, let’s not even mention Mondays!

You’re a fucking CAT, Garfield. Why in the hell would you care what day it was?

This is all fine and dandy, assuming you are one of those poor unfortunate lucky people who work a traditional workweek.  Well…. I don’t, and neither do millions of other hard working Americans who punch a timeclock in the evenings, late nights, and even on Saturdays and Sundays.  But you sure wouldn’t know that from the way pop culture and even worse, the fucking media seem to think every non-unemployed American only works on five certain days of the week…

Yes, Emily, I think you need emergency heart surgery before you die… Oh, look at that! 5:00! TGIF! I’ll be back to fix your heart on Monday morning! Toodles!

Not only would the fine men and women in our emergency services and at our hospitals not know what the camel was spouting off about were he to wander through their workplace, but neither would the large number of people who work in the dark underbelly of our ever growing 24-7-365 service field that society demands.  Traditional Humpdayers would up and riot were Mecca or Mickey Dee’s closed up tight at 10 in the evening when they got a craving for McNuggets or Fabuloso…

Thank goodness for a place to do late night rag runs so I don’t end up sleeping on the couch!

Many of these people in critical or socially important jobs who work “odd” hours don’t even have the luxury of having a set workweek.  I do, and am very grateful for it…. though it means I have a totally different concept of what each day means than those 9 to 5′ers who seem to be the darlings of society do.  My workweek starts on Friday night and ends on Wednesday morning, so to me….

Valentino doesn’t work Fridays…

Nobody gets kicked out of the bars on Wednesday morning…

And as for you, Mr. Camel….

Hooray for Sunday night!!!!!!

Take THAT, traditional workweek!!!  Now it’s time to start recognizing those of us who don’t play by your archaic and silly rules!

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have a weekend to enjoy and a Friday to hide from….

What day it is? I’m too drunk to even know!!!

The dollar bill that brought down an empire…

Nobody is ever going to ever accuse the United States government of being an efficient, cost conscious, common sense organization anytime soon.  Nor will you ever hear anybody claim that it’s easy to get people as a whole to change their long-standing habits… for better or for worse.  For these reasons, the United States continues to be one of the few civilized countries in the world that uses paper currency for its most basic monetary unit.  We have long been, and may forever be a country that has a love affair with the one dollar bill.

Especially if it has a squirrel on it…

There is a very vocal minority in this country who continue to push for common use of a dollar coin for fiscal and environmental benefits… and it isn’t like the government hasn’t tried since the last Peace silver dollar rolled off the mint in 1935…

First came the Eisenhower dollar coin in 1971…

Always bend at the knees when picking up an Eisenhower dollar off the ground.

But the coin was far too large… over three times the size of the quarter.  You’d need a purse just to carry one of these things around, and then wouldn’t have any room for your tampoons.  We may have liked Ike in the 50′s, but did not particularly care for him on our money… so in 1979, the Mint tried adding a little sex appeal…

Hubba hubba!

The Susan B. Anthony dollar coin replaced the Eisenhower coin and corrected one of its major flaws in that it was entirely too large.  Unfortunately, it did not correct its primary flaw… the fact that it was a fucking dollar coin.  Susan B. circulated about as well as ol’ Ike did… as in to say, it was largely confined to bank vaults and collector’s sets.  The government even tried forcing it into circulation by giving it as change at the post office and other federal institutions… but to no avail.  It’s death knell came from the vending machine industry, who stated in no uncertain terms that it was not about to reconfigure its machines to accept these new dollar coins.

Vending machines attack when you try to feed them anything but quarters, nickels or dimes…

Unfazed by the lack of success of its predecessors, the government tried again with another dollar coin redesign.  This time, they made the coin gold colored and included a different female from American history on its face…

Our casino is over there, Mr. Clark.

The Sacagawea “gold” dollar was introduced in 2000, and this time the government was confident it had finally produced a dollar coin that its citizens would actually spend.  It had one thing going for it that its predecessors didn’t… a classic TV ad!

Hey, how could the people of the United States not listen to the advice of the Father of their Country?  George was flat out telling everyone he’d rather spend the dollar coin than the popular piece of paper with his own portrait on it.  And he didn’t look bad for a man who’d been dead for 201 years…

Wait till the General Cornwallis sees my new horseless carriage!

Showing the people how much easier and more convenient the dollar coin is to use is a lot like showing people how much better and more productive their lives would be without Facebook.  The commercials were shrugged off as the Mint just having a bad acid trip, and everyone went back to spending their paper Georges.  Not even Mecca, who normally has a stranglehold on the spending habits of Americans, could force people into using the “Sackies” by partnering with the Mint and giving them out as change in the period following the coin’s release….

NO!!!

While Sacagawea dollars continue to be minted to this day, their production has been dramatically reduced due to a complete lack of demand for them.  Simply put, America doesn’t want a dollar coin.  After all, they are very hard to stamp with Where’s George…

Would you like some help with that?

So as proof that not all advertising is effective, bringing George Washington back to life and dropping him into turn of the millennium New York City did not cause us to all rush for the bank and start trading in our wallet full of paper for a pocket full of slugs.  About the only way the government will force people to spend dollar coins is to stop printing the paper dollar altogether, and that’s not going to be happening anytime soon… hell, the outraged population won’t even allow our government to stop minting pennies, which are the biggest waste of money and resources outside of the server that is keeping this blog online…

They’ll take my pennies away from me only when they pry them from my cold, dead, arthritis riddled hands!

So we here at The Nest would like to raid our lock box and dig up the three Sackies we got in change from Mecca the morning they were first given out so that we may honor this noble effort on the part of the US Mint to convert us all over to metal dollars.  While we may continue to kill millions of trees every year just so that we don’t have even more coins to weigh down our deep pockets, at least we can all rest easily knowing that strippers everywhere will continue to be able to perform safely…

Ah… soft and easy, just like me!

Hop in, everybody!

Bud Light is one of, if not maybe the most popular beer sold in America.  While I’m not a consumer of alcohol, I have a feeling it isn’t because it’s exactly the greatest beer out there.  One thing the boys at Anheuser Busch InBev have done very well over the past three decades, however, is advertise the living hell out of Bud Light… ensuring it is the most recognized brand name in the domestic beer market.  And they haven’t just spammed the airwaves of programming watched by the 18-34 male demographic crowd they so covet with any old spots… the ad men behind Bud Light have utilized many different clever and humorous campaigns over the years.

We’re sold on Bud Light!

One thing which has tied together pretty much every one of the Bud Light advertising themes we’ve seen since the early 90′s is that guys will go to almost any lengths to get a Bud Light, even if it involves the utterly ridiculous.  If the Mars Rover would have found Bud Light plugged in the nostril of the Martian face, you had better believe every twenty-something male in the US would have been lined up at NASA headquarters looking for a seat on the first flight to the red planet…

Even the Martian rats wouldn’t be able to keep dudes away from the Bud Light.

In 1993, Bud Light released an ad in their familiar vein that became instantly popular with viewers featuring a thirsty visitor and a sarcastic limo driver…

There are so many awesome elements in this commercial that helped make it such a big hit… primary among them being the practice of limo drivers holding signs for the people they are supposed to pick up at the airport with the passenger’s name on it.  Without a doubt, these poor drivers had to hear countless bad Dr. Galazkiewicz jokes for years after this commercial aired.  Heck, 8 years after the fact when me and my Dad were flown out to New York for my appearance on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, ABC had a limo pick us up from the airport… and there was the driver at the bottom of the escalator holding up a little sign with my name written on it!  I wanted so bad to ask the driver if he had any Bud Light in the limo…

Given the way he was driving, I’m sure he had already drank it all…

But here we also come to the first odd thing about the commercial.  There are three drivers waiting to pick up passengers, and the man decides to question only the one with the most fucked up name on his sign…

He’d have asked the other two, but Bud Light’s budget only called for two speaking actors.

Being a typical American who can’t handle a word made up mostly of little used consonants, he humorously butchers the name “Galazkiewicz” when he reads it off the card.  I’m not sure if political correctness has advanced enough after two decades to make poking fun at strange foreign names an unforgivable no-no, but then again, I don’t really care.  “Gallyweekich” still cracks my ass up.  And the man’s expression when the driver asks him if he meant that he’s Dr. Galazkiewicz  is also priceless, and an important part of what made this ad a pop culture success.  It also became a hot catch phrase in the mid 90′s.

Yes I am!!!

The driver knows damn good and well this dweeb isn’t really Dr. Galazkiewicz, and gives a sideways glance to his fellow chauffeur next to him, who seems to be enjoying the fact that his rival is dealing with the karma of loading his limo up with Bud Light in the first place.  So despite the fact that this impostor didn’t even know Dr. G was actually a doctor, the driver resigns himself to his role in this ad and takes him to the party limo.

I can play around with all the cool buttons, and yet still make sure everyone in the viewing audience can read the label on my Bud Light!

The fake Dr. G has probably never rode in anything bigger than a Yugo before, and certainly not in any vehicle that had all of the neat features a limousine had.  Crocodile Dundee spent his entire life in the Australian outback, and he wasn’t even as fascinated with our fancy gadgetry when he was taken to New York as this doucherider is with all of the buttons in the back of the limo.  He proceeds to play around with everything he can get his beer-free paw on like he were a 6 year old too big to be restrained in his car seat anymore.  Could you make it any more obvious you aren’t who you claim to be?  The limo driver knows he has totally fucked up in picking up this assclown and is probably going to get fired when the real Dr. Galazkiewicz shows up at the airport and finds out he has to take a dirty taxi to his hotel.  He’s probably planning to “accidentally” leave the back end of the limo out in an intersection with an oncoming semi right about now…

I think I’m going to dump this fool off in the middle of New Jersey.

Even when the driver finally breaks down and sarcastically asks if this is the good “doctor’s” first time in a limo, our Bud Light drinking schmuck has a great smartass reply.

In a limo this small! Now drive on, Jeeves until you come across a sexy hooker for me to share my bounty with!

Like all ads that become overnight successes, the concept behind this commercial was spun off into several other ads featuring the same goofball.  Here’s one where Dr. Galazkiewicz shows up at the Lee Family reunion…

Here’s a cute parody CBS did for the 1994 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four using the commercial’s two original actors and centered around Duke University’s legendary Coach Krzyzewski as the unpronounceable name…

So let’s grab our bottles of Bud Light and make a toast to the unknown, yet unforgettable Dr. Galazkiewicz… without whom this funny ad from the 90′s would have never been possible.  We hope that after 20 years, he did finally find another ride to his hotel… but if not, I hope he enjoyed spending the rest of his life at the airport like Tom Hanks did…

I’ve got food, bathrooms, escalators, and all the free groping and cavity searches I could ever want by the TSA. Why should I ever leave here?

Some commercials feature happy people telling you how much they like a certain product after the company pays them a large amount of money to do so.  Some ads are filled with cute babies and critters who can sell anything with the twinkle of a big ol’ eyeball.  Some commercials have shouting high pressure pitchmen trying to forcefully persuade you to buy what they want you to buy.  There are even ads that don’t make any sense at all….

And then there are wonderful little ads where shit gets killed…. unmercilessly.

RAID!?!?!?!?!?

And why not?  After all, there are many products out there on the market… stuff we buy all the time, that has only one purpose.  To end the life of something we don’t find to be too pleasurable.  Whether it be roaches in the pantry, mucus in the lungs, or Justin Bieber on our lawn again.

Hey! Where’s the party….. huh…. RAID!?!?!?!?

With the exception of myself, most people don’t like weeds.  Weeds are just your everyday, ordinary indigenous plantlife that occupies your lawn that suburban elitists have decided are undesirables and should be eliminated with extreme prejudice.  And the weeds can’t do anything about it since the ACLU has no time to represent the rights of flora, unless it’s the kind that rolls nicely into a joint.  So in the lawn and garden department of your favorite store, you will find a wide selection of weed killing products.  One of the most popular of these brands is Roundup, and in 1998, they released a commercial that will always be in my Top 5 list of funniest TV ads ever…

And it’s not on YouTube!!!!  But this cousin ad is….

If you want to see the original and best iteration of this ad (and the one I will talk about for the rest of this post)… click here to watch it on tvspots.tv, the only place I can find it on the web…

I can’t feel my roots, Hank!!!

Roundup takes the idea of enticing consumers by showing the enemy being taken care of by their product to a whole new level.  Not only have they anthropomorphized the weeds that are being targeted for floracide so that we can’t help but feel a little sorry for them… but for 30 seconds we watch in horror as these two poor little dandelions suffer a slow, gruesome, agonizing death that would make even Freddy Krueger blush through his burnt skin.  The Nazis didn’t even have it this bad in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Thank goodness for the comic relief!

We are going to make you laugh and laugh and….. what? RAID!?!?!?!?!?

I’m not sure if this ad is supposed to parodying some specific genre or not, but it’s like a cross between The Godfather and a spaghetti western.  Hank’s the Big Weed, and The Kid is his apprentice sidekick… and they’re both doomed to turn a nasty shade of yellow and brown thanks to some villainous homeowner who caught them hanging out in the garden and decided to spray first and ask questions later.  The Kid keeps turning to Hank for reassurance that they’re gonna be OK, who just wants to die in peace.  The only thing keeping Hank from slapping the shit out of the mouthy young weedling is the fact that his leafy arms fell off in the first half of the commercial.  Taken literally, nothing The Kid says is technically humorous… yet within the context of this ad, it makes this one of the most hilarious death scenes in the history of drama!

Not counting any death scene involving Buster, of course…

It’s the final thing The Kid says before we are mercifully spared having to watch any more of this savage plant torture that totally makes this ad.  One of the funniest lines from any commercial….. ever!

It brings a tear to my eye…. a tear of laughter, that is!

Like the tagline says… no mercy, no pity, no weeds.  Not even ones that can make us laugh. I think this line of advertising would be awesome for tobacco companies.  Show a couple nasty old people puffing away while hacking up a lung for half a minute.  Not only would it be more effective at deterring people from smoking than those stupid Surgeon General warnings, but we’d all get a really good laugh out of it as well…

You’ve come a long way, baby…

Roundup, the only geniuses you employ who are more evil than the ones you have making your poisonous sprays are your admen who can turn the tragic into the comic so easily.  Thanks, Roundup, for the belly laugh at the expense of these two fine, upstanding weeds who were just minding their own business in someone’s garden some 16 years ago.  There’s nothing wrong with having a dark sense of humor towards the suffering of others, so long as we find the victims to be unpleasant to our tastes.  Right Buster?  Um….. Buster?

Say hello to my little friend!

RAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIDDDDDDDDDD!?!?!?!?

A pretty boy and his pipes, or an international recording superstar? You be the judge.

The 80′s was a golden age of compilation albums.  Record companies nobody had ever heard of were buying up cheap ad time on daytime and late night TV to hawk the greatest hits of the Fabulous 50′s, the Groovy 60′s or the Strung out 70′s.  Want to spend a quiet evening of anarchy indulging in the most romantic hits of the early punk era?  There was a compilation album for that.

Fuckin’ A!

The television ad album craze even sometimes managed to sweep up the occasional weird niche artist who would go from somebody known only to their immediate family to a major pop culture icon before you could even listen to the “21 more songs” that the commercial didn’t have time to list in their scroll.  Such a man is Gheorghe Zamfir…

During the late 80′s and early 90′s, Zamfir was brought to our television screens and built up as one of the greatest musicians to ever walk the earth.  The commercial starts out by bragging that Zamfir has sold over 20 million records, and has had 30 gold and platinum albums!  As you listen to the melody he is playing from the elevator to Hell, you might be wondering to yourself whether Zamfir’s family bought all those records themselves  just to make him feel good about himself.  Ah, that incredible statement is prefaced by “In Europe…”, where shitty music still reigns supreme.  Over there, they’ll even buy polka records that were not made by Weird Al Yankovic.

The pipes that sold a zillion albums in Europe.

Zamfir is dubbed in this ad as “The Master of The Pan Flute.”  Zamfir earned this lofty title by being the only person in the world to ever even play the fucking pan flute.  How in the world does one take up an instrument nobody has ever heard of before, anyway?  Did he try out for the junior high band and all of the instruments were already taken, so he ripped off part of the radiator and started blowing in it?  Was it the world’s worst Christmas gift from his Aunt Helga?  Regardless of how Zamfir and the pan flute were first introduced, it turned out to be a match made in pussified music heaven!

Zamfir made the angels sing! No doubt to drown out the noise from below…

Of course, the admen behind this commercial knew America wasn’t ready for a pan flautist, so they had to take the time to make the mystery instrument look even cooler than an electric guitar.  It’s proclaimed to be “a magical instrument with an enchanting sound that is unforgettable!  So hauntingly beautiful, it’s unlike anything you’ve heard before!”  You know what other magical thing has an enchanting sound that is unforgettable and unlike anything you have heard before?  An orgasm.  And nobody’s going to be having one so long as some hippie is playing the damn pan flute!

Exclusive because no record store would even put The magic of Zamfir in their bargain bin.

Listen, as The Master of The Pan Flute rips off a hauntingly unforgettable version of the theme from “Chariots of Fire”…

Zamfir is good cardio music…

Zamfir doesn’t just tackle movie themes… no fewer than three light rock hits can be found in the scroll of hideous pan flute songs on this exclusive TV album.  Elton John’s already horrific “Your Song”, Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are”, and even The Beatles’ “Yesterday” are not immune from being covered by The Master of The Pan Flute.  Now I know what to give Merby for her birthday…

And I know what that’ll get me…

Want to enjoy listening to some killer pan flute music on the best of retro technology?  Well, you’re in luck!  The Magic of Zamfir is available on vinyl, cassette, or 8 track!  Yes, they released this album on 8 track over a decade after the last 8 track player had been thrown out with the Pet Rock!

8 track player also not available in any store.

Thanks to this one ingeniously ridiculous and frequently repalyed ad, Zamfir is still known today not only as The Master of the Pan Flute, but as the personification of Shitty Music that needs to be mocked.  Americans generally don’t buy albums full of pan flute music to voluntarily play on their home stereo.  Listening to Zamfir around the house would drive your dog up the wall and force your cat to bite you.  I guess, though, it is better to be well known and ridiculed than to be a nobody all of your life.

The perfect vocalist to accompany pan flute music.

Did you know that Zamfir’s pan flute can be heard on the soundtrack to The Karate Kid?  It’s true, according to his Wiki page!  He also got his first big break in 1972 from a composer named Vladimir Cosma… who is best known by the classic Nickelodeon generation as being the man behind all of the music on cult classic cartoon “Spartakus and The Sun Beneath The Sea”!  Thank God there at least wasn’t any pan fluting going on in that cartoon….

Though listening to Spartakus playing that twanging instrument was annoying enough.

They say music tames the savage breast, and nothing can possible be more savage than a big boob playing the pan flute.  The Nest would like to salute Romanian idol Zamfir and the soulless recording entity that brought him into our living rooms across the United States and seared his magically unforgettable music into our brains over 25 years ago.  You have provided us all with the inspiration to become the master of something totally obscure that has absolutely no practical musical use other than to loosen earwax.  I am dusting off my kazoo as I speak, and maybe 10 years from now with a little practice and the help of some ad saturation, I will be known throughout the world as Evil Squirrel, The King of the Kazoo!

A star is born!

They’re better than chileh!

Listen.  Do you want to know a secret?  Do you promise not to tell?

There are all kinds of reasons to keep something a secret.  Governments protect information from our enemies, as well as from the people with three heads who have no idea their town had been sprayed with Agent Orange for the past five decades.  Friends keep hot gossip hush hush to avoid hurting the wrong people, at least until the right people ask them.  And companies keep their formulas and recipes a secret to prevent companies from cutting into their profits.

The secret to my success? Being a total asshole!

The secret recipes behind some of our favorite food and drinks are protected by security that would make Fort Knox look like an open house.  Jay Bush sure wasn’t going to take any chances of anyone getting the family recipe that makes his line of baked beans so popular among the bean eating, gas passing public.  So he made sure the only other individual who knew the secret recipe couldn’t tell a soul…

Alas, YouTube fails me again.  The original ad in this series is not over there, nor can I even find it on any other site on the entire damn web.  But the commercial I linked to gives you a general idea of what this Bush’s campaign was all about, which I’ve outlined below…

This cute little ad campaign with Jay Bush and his talking dog Duke first hit our TV’s in the last 90′s, and still pops up on occasion to this day.  It made a catchphrase out of its signature line “Roll that beautiful bean footage!”, which Duke parrots in the very first ad that set up this series.  We aren’t sure what bean footage is supposed to be, but it’s just so cool to say!

Roll that beautiful bean footage!

The funny thing about secret recipes, though, is that while they are closely guarded like the solvency of the corporation depends upon it… the fact is that they really aren’t that well hidden at all.  A chemist worth their Bunsen burner could tell you what ingredients are all in Coca Cola.  It wouldn’t be that difficult to deconstruct Col. Sanders’ original recipe by just buying a bucket of his chicken.  So why is it that apparently nobody has discovered these secret formulas yet and made a mountain of money using someone else’s hard work?

Other than Disney, that is…

The secret behind why secret recipes are really such a sham is the fact that what is valuable to these companies isn’t the formula itself that is hermetically sealed inside a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnall’s porch.  It’s the brand name of the product that is valuable…. and no other entity can copy that, at least without legal consequences.  Any moron could make a pop soda that tastes exactly like Coke…. but only the Coca Cola Corporation can call its product Coke and can publicly denounce your concoction as just a lame imitation of the real thing.  Nobody is going to buy your ripoff no matter how much you scream that it is exactly like Coke….

Sorry Great Value, you can’t use the power of Wendell!

But of course, the hype surrounding the fact that their formulas are so secret has worked very much to Coke’s and KFC’s advantage over the years.  The aura of mystique surrounding the mystery of the secret ingredients has itself sold quite a few red cans and striped buckets.  And with the classic commercial campaign that was the subject of today’s Retro TV Ad Tuesday, Bush’s Baked Beans has cut themselves in a little of that “I got a secret!” action…

Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!

So today The Nest gives a big, greasy high five to Jay Bush and his trusty canine companion Duke for teasing us with the family secret behind making something so disgusting somehow taste a little less disgusting.  We only hope that should something dreadful happen to either man or beast, that someone else is able to step forward that can be trusted with the closely guarded family recipe that will keep the success of Bush’s Baked Beans out of the hands of those who would like to make generic clones. Where will we find such a man?

Roll that beautiful bean footage!

Wanna get up to 50% off of suckers?

It’s hard to believe how much things can change in our culture in such a short period of time.  Nobody 20 years ago, not even AT&T, predicted that cell phones would be the wave of the future… and yet look around you.  Check out a photo or video from 20 years ago and look how our cars have changed in just a couple decades.  It isn’t a question of when did cars all become shiny and sleek, but was there really a time when they weren’t?

And just think of how ubiquitous casinos are these days.  Are there any states left that don’t at least have a token “boat in a moat” to help fund education so the next generation will be smart enough not to put any money in a slot machine?

OK class, who knows what beats a straight flush?

It’s hard to fathom that a mere 25 years ago, the only places where it was legal to have a casino on non-Indian grounds were in Nevada and Atlantic City.  The riverboat casino craze of the 90′s made gambling dens more accessible to the nation, but it would be a while before you couldn’t drive 20 miles without passing a place claiming to have loose sluts slots.  For many, Vegas and Atlantic City were quite a jaunt, and what was the point of traveling to a gambling mecca if by the time you paid for your airfare and hotel, you didn’t have enough left to even play the penny machines?

es….. ES…… ES!!!!!

Well, a company called Players Club International had a solution to your problems!  They hired Telly Savalas to do a series of TV ads that were all over the late night airwaves in the late 80′s and early 90′s.  Here’s one such ad for your perusal…

Sign up to become a Players Club member, and you’d be entitled to more discounts in Las Vegas than Charlie Sheen.  The actual size of the discounts seemed to change from commercial to commercial for some reason, but perhaps that’s just the nature of the bookmaking business.  The more Players Club action going on in one hotel, the lower the discount goes to even the odds for the house.  Hey, at least you’ll be staying in fabulous rooms in first class hotels!

Players Club members only have to spend 15 cents for the vibrating bed.

Players Club is more than just a way to save money on casino hotels, though.  Flashing your Players Club card also gets you a deep discount on your airfare, meals, and even those fabulous Las Vegas shows!  Oh, if only they had the Players Club before Elvis faked his death!

You get 25% off the show, and Roy gets 25% off his arm.

In the commercial I embedded here, they have Hilton Vice President Michael I. Maggiore come on to say a few flattering words about Players Club members to entice you to join up.  “There’s just something about Players Club members that stands out!” Maggiore reads off of the cue card a Players Club intern is holding up for him.  Sure there’s something that stands out about them… the fistful of dollars they bring with them each trip, and offering members discounts is a good way to get them and their wad of money to visit your casino more often.  Players Club was essentially an early incarnation of the points scam casinos use these days to lure gamblers to come back more often.  If only people listened to Drew Carey’s advice about the points not mattering…

Quadricorns are evil!

Per their Wiki page, Players Club charged a high first year’s fee to become a member… but at least you got two free nights in Las Vegas or Atlantic City out of the deal.  Well, if you allowed the Players Club operator to book your flight for you.  Have a safe trip!

Atlantic City here I come!

Sadly, due to the proliferation of casinos that I mentioned earlier in this post, Players Club didn’t have a very long lifespan.  By the mid 90′s, the brass behind the little black card decided to get out of the travel discount racket and into the riverboat casino business…. which it also managed to fail at.  In 2000, the few casino holdings they had were sold to Harrah’s via a corporate takeover.  Perhaps it was just as well, since it’s hard to imagine their ads without the bald eagle Telly Savalas smoothly rolling off the club’s benefits and places a member could use them.  Las Vegas!  Atlantic City!  Reno!  Lake TAHoe!  The Caribbean!  Telly died in January 1994, right around the time Players Club went belly up.  Coincidence?

Security! Could you escort this creepy bald guy off of the hotel property, please?

A little gambling never hurt anyone, but a lot of gambling made you a VIP at any casino you walked in to.  And thanks to the Players Club and Telly Savalas, you could save a nice chunk of change while you were getting taken to the cleaners.  And so The Nest would like to salute this one of a kind club and their charming spokesman, who never met a sucker he didn’t like.  There’s one born every minute, and with the help of Players Club, they would never have to pay too much to wind up in so much debt.

Atlantic City was never so cruel to me!

Let’s end this post with a little video of Jim Carrey back when he was actually funny!

They say that one of the best ways to make money, other than starting your own reality show on cable, is to invest it wisely.  There are countless brokerage companies out there looking to earnestly take a cut of your money so that they can dump it all in a junk fund that will make themselves and their cronies all feelthy rich and living it up at Millionaire Acres while you have to take up residence on the Poor Farm…

Well, it beats being lost in the jungle…

As the 80′s dawned upon us and the culture of greed was ready to explode on the scene like spiked hair and excess makeup, old established houses of financial wisdom had to hit the airwaves and advertise among the hoi polloi of consumer items out there if they wanted to ensure those hefty commissions kept rolling in.  One of them even managed to create an ad campaign that, while not all that well remembered, was quite popular and recognizable at the time its commercials were airing in the late 70′s and early 80′s.  For this week’s Retro Ad Tuesday, let’s take a look back at the brokerage that could silence the noisiest crowd….

If you are as old as me (or, dirt, in other words), you probably recall the famous tagline to this campaign…. “When EF Hutton talks, people listen!”  So you got this guy mentioning EF Hutton and hushing an entire airport, even the guy who was getting a cavity search by the TSA.  You also had golfer Tom Watson shushing a golf crowd… which really isn’t all that much of an accomplishment since they don’t let real sports fans who hoot and holler into a golf tournament.  And this diner silencing an entire restaurant full of millionaires and snotty waiters because apparently his brokers can predict the winning lottery numbers.

This is my favorite EF Hutton ad, though… the first commercial in this video:

You gotta love an old, conservative outfit like EF Hutton going totally non sequitur and playing off the fact that their founder’s first and middle initials were consecutive letters of the alphabet.  Ebeneezer Scrooge would be proud of this ad.

Though he might take exception with how much it cost to run the ad…

These kids aren’t even old enough to get an allowance yet, but they want to know what EF Hutton has to say about stock in WordPress, or those all important chileh futures.  Kids, sit back down in your chairs and let me give you a lesson about how the people who make their living off of Wall Street can sometimes set a bad example you wouldn’t want to listen to…

Seriously? And they don’t put you white people in jail for this?

The same decade that gave us Michael Milken and the Savings and Loan scandals actually started off with a little bit of financial shenanigans by the brokerage everyone wants to listen to.  EF Hutton found a clever way to spend the same money twice in what essentially amounted to check kiting.  They constantly wrote checks their asses couldn’t cash because they were also spending the money in the account the check was going to draw from when it cleared.  Since this was still 1980, and it took about seven years for a check to clear the bank (that may be a slight exaggeration), it gave the boys at EF Hutton a nice little window to use their money in the bank, while also having the spending power of the check that is in limbo.  While EF Hutton was able to dodge any severe penalties once their little scheme was uncovered by the federal government in 1984, the bad publicity led to a lot of lost business and EF Hutton faded from the public’s eye for good…

So my broker’s EF Hutton, and…. um, I said EF HUTTON! Anyone? Hello? Baby Ruth!

In a rather interesting sidenote, the company we used to know as EF Hutton eventually wound up merging with another brokerage that had a famous ad slogan around the same time as Hutton’s…. Smith Barney!

Here at The Nest, we don’t have any investments other than the crap we get by being employed at Mecca and the stash of acorns we have buried in the backyard collecting ants, but no interest.  But many others like to invest in the market of corporate America, so we’d like to give a cup of the ear salute to EF Hutton for being able to stop traffic back in the day when people actually overheard conversations and weren’t lost in smartphones or iPods.  When The Nest squawks, people listen… and we get our likes the old fashioned way…. we suck up earn them!

Nobody ever stopped to listen to what you had to say, E*Trade baby.