Welcome back to Throwback Thursday. Lauren has us stretching our memory banks once again to remember commercials and advertising jingles. Head over to her blog to get the details, and then join in!
This week’s prompt is: Commercials and Jingles
My post follows.
This is one of those topics that could get too long, too fast. So I tried to organize my thoughts a little before I started writing.
When I first thought about jingles, my mind immediately went to Barry Manilow and his VSM (Very Strange Medley) consisting of jingles he had some part in creating. Here’s the link if you want to take that walk down memory lane.
We had a black and white television for years and years, so commercials to me were always in black and white. Commercials provided the time to quickly go to the bathroom, get a snack, or run an errand for our parents. There was no pausing, rewinding, fast forwarding, or DVRs. Heck video tapes were still years away in the future. If you missed the show, you missed the show until the reruns ran in the spring.
Commercials were the first advertisements most of us were exposed to outside of the ads in the back of comic books. They showed us the glamorous allure of things most of us could never afford. They had music and catch phrases to make sure we remembered the product. I can still remember the words to most commercial jingles and can easily connect the hook line with the product.
To keep this short enough to read, I decided to break it down by category and pick my favorite or most memorable in each group. Many of the commercials were for products not necessarily geared toward children but we watched just the same.
Toys
The one toy I always wanted and finally did receive for Christmas one year was my Chatty Cathy Doll. I never had a change of clothes for her but that was fine with me.
Snacks or Candy
There are so many in this category, but I’m going for Cracker Jacks! I always loved this jingle.
Foods
This is the debut cartoon for the Trix rabbit. Poor guy. I wonder if he is related to Wile E. Coyote?
Medicine
My choice here has to be Bayer’s Children’s aspirin. (”Mothers are like that, yeah they are.”)
Then there were cigarette commercials which were eventually banned. I remember so many of these and their slogans. Thankfully, I never took up smoking, but I did run around singing this jingle!
Beauty Products
Hands down it had to be Dippity Do! Easy, Neat! When we used it I do not recall it being so easy or neat and our hair felt a little crunchy when the rollers came out.
I laughed at Lauren’s Cal Worthington commercial. They also played in Alaska when I lived there. When he said “Go See Cal” my kids thought he was saying “Pussy Cow” over and over again. The commercial I remember most from my time in Alaska was a commercial for Ranier Beer. I thought it was pretty clever. You need the volume up because there are very few words.
With the advent of cable tv (which was originally advertised as having no commercials – that’s why we paid for it!) current day commercials seem to come from big Pharma. There are a few companies who still try to put a heart in their ads so I will close with a favorite of mine. This is from the Publix grocery store chain who employs great advertising people.
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