September 2026 - Page 3 of 3 - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

Happy Meals

Here’s a commercial showing the beginning of something that eventually became such a normal part of childhood that it’s hard to imagine McDonald’s without the Happy Meal.

This commercial is from 1979, the year McDonald’s took the Happy Meal nationwide. But here’s something that confused me at first: the Happy Meal actually dates to both 1977 and 1979.

McDonald’s was already test-marketing Happy Meals in selected cities beginning in 1977, and the company even filed the HAPPY MEAL trademark that year. Those early tests gave McDonald’s time to refine the meal, the packaging and the prizes.

Then in June 1979, the Happy Meal officially went national with the colorful Circus Wagon boxes. That’s why 1979 is usually considered its official birthday.

And those first boxes weren’t tied to Disney, a movie or the latest cartoon. Inside you got a hamburger or cheeseburger, fries, a drink and McDonaldland cookies, along with prizes like an ID bracelet, Doodler ruler or McPuzzle Lock.

I also didn’t realize how complicated the “who invented the Happy Meal?” story was. Advertising executive Bob Bernstein said the activity-covered box was inspired by watching his son read cereal boxes at breakfast. But in Guatemala, McDonald’s operator Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño had already created a smaller children’s meal called the Menú Ronald, complete with a gift.

And McDonald’s wasn’t even the first burger chain to try the idea. Burger Chef introduced its Funmeal in 1973 and later sued McDonald’s over the similarities.

What amazes me is how quickly it all took off. By the end of 1979, McDonald’s was already doing movie tie-ins, and from there the toy became almost as important as the food.

Do you remember your first Happy Meal — and were you more excited about the hamburger or the toy?

Before Taxi, Judd Hirsch Was Selling Us Listerine

Take another look at the young radio DJ in this commercial. That’s Judd Hirsch, years before Taxi, Ordinary People and the long career we know him for today.

This spot appears to be from around 1970, when Hirsch was still trying to establish himself as an actor and doing commercials to make a living. What I didn’t know was that before acting, he had earned a degree in physics and actually worked as an engineer. A few years after this commercial, his career began taking off, and by 1978 he was Alex Rieger on Taxi, eventually winning two Emmys for the role.

But the other star here may really be Listerine’s advertising.

Most companies tried desperately to convince us their products tasted good. Listerine basically said the opposite. Its famous campaign was “The taste people hate twice a day.” In other words, yes, it tastes awful — but that must mean it works!

And boy did we believe that.

Listerine had actually been around since 1879, originally developed as an antiseptic rather than an everyday mouthwash. By the 1920s, advertising helped make the word “halitosis” part of the American vocabulary and convinced generations that bad breath could ruin everything from a date to a marriage.

Looking back, I think the burning sensation became part of Listerine’s identity. You swished it around, tried desperately to make it the full 30 seconds, and then came up gasping for air!

And sitting there in this old commercial is a young Judd Hirsch, probably with no idea that millions of us would someday know him as one of television’s most familiar faces.

Did you recognize Judd Hirsch right away — and be honest, how long could you actually keep old-fashioned Listerine in your mouth?

When we were growing up, did we really think Ragu was authentic Italian food?

I think a lot of us probably did — or at least we never questioned it. The commercial ended with “That’s Italian!”, there was an Italian family gathered around the table, Mom or Grandma knew good sauce when she tasted it, and that jar somehow represented the Old World.

And the interesting part is that Ragu really did have authentic Italian roots. Assunta and Giovanni Cantisano came to America from Italy in 1914, settled in Rochester, New York, and in 1937 began selling Assunta’s homemade family sauce from their home.

But by the time we were seeing commercials like this one, Ragu had become something quite different — a huge American packaged-food brand. It went national around 1970 and absolutely dominated the jarred spaghetti-sauce business. By 1975, Ragu reportedly controlled about 65 percent of the prepared spaghetti-sauce market.

And those commercials were a big reason why. Beginning in the 1970s, millions were spent selling us “That’s Italian”, using the family, the kitchen, Mom and Grandma and all the familiar Italian-American imagery to make opening a jar feel like somebody had been simmering sauce all afternoon.

Of course, what Italians traditionally call ragù can be very different. The official Bolognese version is a slow-cooked meat sauce with pancetta, vegetables, wine and relatively little tomato — quite a distance from the red tomato sauce most of us poured from a jar.

So maybe Ragu wasn’t exactly Italy in a jar. It was really an Italian immigrant family recipe that evolved into a very American idea of Italian food.

And apparently the advertising worked on us pretty well!

Be honest — growing up, did you think Ragu was authentic Italian sauce, or did your family insist homemade was the only real thing?

Dolly Parton, Breeze and the Free Towel in the Detergent Box

This old Breeze detergent commercial with Dolly Parton sent me down a rabbit hole, because I remembered detergent boxes with glasses and dishes inside too. I assumed somewhere along the way they switched to towels.

Turns out, that’s not quite what happened.

The glasses and famous Golden Wheat dishes were associated with Duz, a Procter & Gamble detergent. Breeze was made by rival Lever Brothers, and its specialty was towels. Breeze was putting genuine Cannon towels and washcloths in detergent boxes by at least 1956. So what many of us may remember as one promotion changing over the years was actually several detergent companies competing to see who could put the most tempting “free” premium in the box.

And apparently those giveaways really worked. In 1966, Lever Brothers told a Canadian government committee that it had distributed around 170 million towels in detergent packages over 15 years. When the company tried selling detergent at a lower price without the towel, sales dropped so badly they abandoned the idea.

Then along came Dolly Parton. She joined The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967, and Breeze became one of the products Dolly and Porter promoted during those years. Dolly later remembered that they had to do their own commercials on the show, pulling those enormous towels right out of the Breeze boxes. She even said she still had some of the towels years later.

So Mom wasn’t necessarily choosing detergent just because it got the clothes clean. Sometimes she was working on a new set of glasses, dishes or towels too!

What did your family collect from detergent boxes — glasses, Golden Wheat dishes, towels, or something else?

ABC “Meet Us in September” — 1969

I remember this song like it was yesterday, played dozens of times a day on ABC to promote the new season. I was hoping to find the writer or performer of the song, but no luck this time.

“Meet Us in September” was ABC’s big promotional campaign for the fall of 1969, and looking back at what ABC was introducing that season, they had plenty to promote. The Brady Bunch, Marcus Welby, M.D., Room 222, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Love, American Style and ABC’s Movie of the Week were all part of that new season.

The graphics in this clip were created by Harry Marks, one of the pioneers of television motion graphics. That same year Marks worked with Douglas Trumbull, who had done groundbreaking visual-effects work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, to create the memorable opening for ABC’s Movie of the Week.

I really thought finding out who wrote and sang the catchy “Meet Us in September” jingle would be the easy part. Surprisingly, the surviving archival material credits Marks for the visuals but doesn’t identify a songwriter or the studio singers. Rather than guess and attach somebody’s name to it, we’ll have to leave that one a mystery for now.

ABC was still battling CBS and NBC for viewers, but this season brought some major successes. Marcus Welby finished #8 during its first season and, the following year, became the first ABC series ever to finish #1 in the ratings.

It’s funny how a little network promo like this can stick in your head for more than half a century. Does anyone else remember ABC playing “Meet Us in September” over and over as the new fall season approached?