Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures - Do You Remember - Page 2 of 53 - online community focused on sharing and reminiscing about video, audio, and images that stir our memories of the past - old television, theme songs, commercials, print advertisements, the sights and sounds you remember

Did You Walk A Mile For A Camel?

If you grew up watching television in the 1950s or ’60s, cigarette commercials weren’t unusual or something that jumped out at you — everybody saw them. Camel, Winston, Marlboro, Salem and the rest were mixed right in with the cereal, cars and laundry detergent.

And Camel was certainly no little brand. It was introduced by R.J. Reynolds in 1913, became the company’s first nationally marketed cigarette and within four years was America’s number-one seller.

The commercial I’m showing comes from Camel’s revival of one of advertising’s most famous lines: “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel.” What surprised me is how old that slogan actually was. Smithsonian records show it appearing in Camel advertising back in the 1920s, and Reynolds brought the idea back again near the end of the 1960s.

There’s also a future TV connection. Geoffrey Scott, who later played Mark Jennings on Dynasty, became one of the faces of the “Walk a Mile” Camel campaign. Scott made nearly 100 commercials during his career and also wound up doing ads for Old Spice and even portraying a Marlboro Man.

Then everything changed. Federal law ended cigarette advertising on American radio and television after January 1, 1971.

Do you remember the Camel commercials themselves, or mostly just the line “I’d Walk a Mile for a Camel”?

Peabody and Sherman

Peabody and Sherman were one of those great little pieces of Rocky and Bullwinkle that managed to sneak some history in between all the jokes. Officially called Peabody’s Improbable History, the series followed the unbelievably intelligent Mr. Peabody and his adopted boy Sherman as they traveled through time using the WABAC Machine.

What surprised me is just how many of these they made — 91 separate adventures, most only about four-and-a-half minutes long. Bill Scott supplied Peabody’s voice, and he was also the voice of Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Sherman was voiced by Walter Tetley, who was already 44 years old when the series debuted in 1959, despite sounding completely believable as a young boy.

The supporting voices were just as impressive. Paul Frees, better known around the Bullwinkle universe as Boris Badenov, handled many of the historical characters, while June Foray turned up in numerous female roles.

And then there was that wonderful WABAC Machine. The name became so closely associated with traveling into the past that decades later the Internet Archive borrowed the idea for its own Wayback Machine.

The history was usually twisted, the situations were ridiculous, and Peabody somehow always managed to finish everything off with a terrible pun. That’s probably exactly why we remember them so well.

My Favorite Martian

When I think of My Favorite Martian, I really don’t remember watching it as a first-run show — I remember the repeats. After looking into it, I have a feeling I’m far from alone.

The show originally aired Sunday nights at 7:30 on CBS from 1963 through 1966, right after Lassie and immediately before The Ed Sullivan Show. And here’s something I never really thought about: at the same time over on NBC, it was going head-to-head with Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. That’s quite a Sunday night television lineup!

The opening I’m showing here is from 1965, when My Favorite Martian finally made the jump to color for its third and final season. The first 75 episodes were black-and-white, while only the last 32 were produced in color. Production also moved from Desilu to MGM that final year.

But here’s why so many of us may remember the show from later. Almost immediately after the CBS run ended, My Favorite Martian went into syndication. I found a 1967 television-industry advertisement promoting all 107 episodes to stations as “The Martian Strip,” with the show already running or being sold in major markets around the country.

So while Uncle Martin originally belonged to Sunday nights, reruns probably created a whole second generation of viewers who never really thought about when the show originally aired. I think I’m one of them.

And once that George Greeley theme starts, I’m right back there again!

Do you remember watching My Favorite Martian on Sunday nights, or like me, do you mostly remember it from the reruns?

The Monkees, Bugs Bunny and Kool-Aid

Talk about putting two things together that you wouldn’t expect — The Monkees and Bugs Bunny selling Kool-Aid!

But the first thing I noticed was that there are only three Monkees here. Peter Tork had already left the group in December 1968, leaving Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Michael Nesmith to carry on as a trio. By this point their NBC television series was over too, but that wasn’t the end of The Monkees on television.

In the fall of 1969, CBS brought the show back as Saturday morning reruns, and General Foods’ Kool-Aid was a sponsor. That explains a lot about why these commercials exist. The Monkees were suddenly being introduced to kids all over again, and Kool-Aid had three very recognizable spokesmen ready to go.

Bugs Bunny wasn’t new to Kool-Aid either. I found that the “Make Friends with Kool-Aid” campaign was already using Bugs several years earlier, so pairing him with The Monkees was really a combination of two existing advertising ideas.

There’s another interesting connection from this period. Their 1969 album The Monkees Present was also tied into a Kool-Aid promotion. The group was well past peak Monkeemania by then, Peter was gone and Michael Nesmith would soon leave too.

And for anyone wondering where the Kool-Aid Man is — he wasn’t the television star yet! That familiar walking pitcher didn’t make his big TV debut until 1975.

Looking back, this commercial is almost a snapshot of The Monkees right near the end of their original run.

Do you remember this commercial, or do you remember The Monkees more from their Saturday morning reruns?

The Bullwinkle Show

I think one of the reasons Rocky and Bullwinkle still holds up is that when we watched it as kids, we probably weren’t getting half the jokes! The kids got a flying squirrel, a goofy moose and Boris and Natasha constantly trying to cause trouble, while the adults were getting political satire, pop-culture references and some pretty clever wordplay.

The show actually started in 1959 as Rocky and His Friends before moving to NBC in 1961 and becoming The Bullwinkle Show. What surprised me was how much talent was packed into those voices. Bill Scott, who played Bullwinkle, was also the show’s head writer and co-producer. June Foray voiced both Rocky and Natasha, Paul Frees played Boris, and that great narrator’s voice belonged to William Conrad, who many of us later knew as Cannon.

Here’s another one I didn’t know: Bullwinkle’s name reportedly came from a real person, Clarence Bullwinkel, who owned a car dealership near Berkeley and was known by creator Alex Anderson.

And despite how simple the animation sometimes looked, that almost became part of the charm. A lot of the animation work was done in Mexico to keep production costs down, while the writing remained incredibly sharp.

I went back to these cartoons expecting pure childhood nostalgia, but they’re actually funnier when you’re old enough to understand what the writers were sneaking past us!

Flatsy Dolls: They Were Flat and That Was That!

Here’s one that really could only have come out of the late 1960s — Flatsy, the doll whose big selling point was that she was…flat!

But there was actually more thought put into these than I remembered. The dolls were made of soft vinyl with wire inside so you could bend and pose them, and some came mounted in decorative frames that could actually be hung on the wall. You could even wear some of the dolls on your clothes.

I found something interesting in a 1968 issue of Broadcasting magazine: Ideal was already planning network and major-market advertising for its new Flatsys beginning February 1, 1969. The line lasted until 1973 and grew well beyond the dolls in this commercial, with Fashion Flatsys, mini versions, Flatsyville, Candy Mountain and different playsets.

Even the company behind them has a great story. Ideal traced its beginnings to Morris and Rose Michtom, the couple associated with creating the original American Teddy bear after Theodore Roosevelt’s famous 1902 hunting incident.

And somehow that little jingle did its job — “Flatsys, Flatsys, they’re flat and that’s that” is still being remembered more than 50 years later.

Did you actually have a Flatsy, or is it the commercial and jingle you remember most?

When Jonathan Winters Sold Us Hefty Trash Bags

Here’s one of those commercials where the product almost takes a back seat to the guy selling it. Jonathan Winters could turn something as ordinary as a trash bag into a comedy routine, and Hefty apparently knew exactly what it had.

I found Winters doing Hefty commercials as early as August 1970, and there are documented spots with him still representing the brand in November 1978. That’s a pretty long run for what could easily have been a one-shot celebrity endorsement.

What I didn’t realize was how much of Winters’ own comedy world crossed over into these commercials. His famous old-lady character Maude Frickert was partly inspired by an aunt who taught him poker when he was only nine. Then in 1972, Winters actually appeared on The New Scooby-Doo Movies, voicing both himself and Maude in The Frickert Fracas.

And there’s another connection most of us probably know without connecting the dots — Robin Williams considered Winters a huge influence. Years later they wound up working together on Mork & Mindy, with Winters playing Mork and Mindy’s very unusual son, Mearth.

So this is really a little piece of comedy history disguised as a garbage-bag commercial. Do you remember Jonathan Winters more from the Hefty commercials, Mork & Mindy, or somewhere else?

Enjoli: The 24-Hour Woman Who Could Bring Home the Bacon

Who remembers “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan…”? Sometimes the commercial becomes more memorable than the product itself, and I think Enjoli is a perfect example

Charles of the Ritz introduced Enjoli in 1978 as “the eight-hour perfume for the 24-hour woman.” The woman in this commercial could go to work, come home, take care of the kids, cook dinner and still have enough energy left for romance. Looking at it today, it’s quite a time capsule of what advertising was telling women they should somehow be able to accomplish

The jingle wasn’t created from scratch for Enjoli either. It was adapted from “I’m a Woman,” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Christine Kittrell recorded it first in 1962, but Peggy Lee’s version later that year became the one most of us recognize. Enjoli rewrote the lyrics and turned a song from the early ’60s into one of the most memorable advertising jingles of the late ’70s

And apparently the advertising worked. Enjoli won the Fragrance Foundation’s 1979 Fragrance of the Year award in the Women’s Popular category.

The whole “24-hour woman” idea has become interesting historically too. Writers looking back at the period have used this very commercial when discussing the expectation that women could build careers while still handling most of the work at home

Enjoli even got a sequel of sorts in 1984 with Enjoli Midnight, advertised as a fragrance for “another eight hours in your life”

I’m guessing plenty of people who never owned a bottle of Enjoli can still sing that commercial

Did the jingle come back to you before the commercial was even over?

You’ve Got a Lot to Live, and Pepsi’s Got a Lot to Give

This is one of those commercials where I remembered the Pepsi slogan, but I never really thought about everything they packed into the minute.

This one is actually known as “Big Town U.S.A.”, and instead of spending much time telling us how Pepsi tasted, they turned New York City itself into the commercial. We get couples, kids playing in the streets, a hot dog cart, fire hydrants, the Brooklyn Bridge and that boy carrying his baseball glove all the way to an almost completely empty Yankee Stadium. The Smithsonian even has this commercial preserved as part of its Pepsi Generation collection.

And that familiar “You’ve Got a Lot to Live, and Pepsi’s Got a Lot to Give” jingle has quite a story of its own. It was written by Joe Brooks, who later wrote “You Light Up My Life,” and Pepsi even had artists including Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Tammy Wynette and Three Dog Night record versions of the campaign music.

What really stands out looking back is how little this feels like a traditional soda commercial. Pepsi was selling youth, neighborhoods, friendships and a way of life — exactly what the Pepsi Generation idea was designed to do.

How many of you remembered the commercial itself — and how many immediately remembered that Pepsi jingle?

Liberace Feelin’ Groovy

This may be one of the strangest—and most wonderfully 1968—things I’ve come across in a while. That’s Liberace getting “groovy” with The Youngfolk on The Red Skelton Hour on March 5, 1968.

And The Youngfolk weren’t just a bunch of dancers thrown together for the show. They were an actual seven-member Los Angeles folk group who recorded for United Artists and had already made several appearances with Red Skelton.

The song, of course, was Paul Simon’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).” Simon & Garfunkel recorded it on August 16, 1966—which, amazingly, was 60 years ago this week. Their version wasn’t originally the big single, though. Harpers Bizarre turned it into a #13 hit in 1967 with an arrangement by Leon Russell.

What I love about this clip is watching television try to interpret the whole flower-power generation for a mainstream audience. Giant flowers, bright colors, “groovy” slang—and right in the middle of it all is Liberace, completely committing to the bit.

Even better, Paul Simon eventually admitted he really didn’t care for this song and once jokingly used it as his own punishment after making a mistake onstage!

Do you remember seeing variety shows trying to get “hip” like this back in the late ’60s?