classic commercials Archives - Page 2 of 7 - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

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”?

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 Get A Big Delight In Every Bite

This early commercial takes us back very close to the beginning. Ho Hos were introduced in 1967 after first being made by hand in a San Francisco bakery, with mass production following soon afterward. Ding Dongs arrived that same year, making 1967 a pretty important one for the Hostess snack aisle

I like how simple this commercial is. Long before Hostess surrounded its cakes with cartoon characters, the selling point was basically right there on the screen — chocolate cake rolled around crème filling, covered in chocolate, and the promise that “you get a big delight in every bite”

A few years later Hostess advertising became much more colorful. Happy Ho Ho arrived as a little Robin Hood-style character with a feathered cap, bow and arrows, joining Twinkie the Kid, Captain Cupcake, King Ding Dong and the rest of the Hostess gang. (popicon.life)

And Ho Hos certainly caught on. By their 40th anniversary in 2007, Americans were eating around 100 million a year. Pittsburgh was even declared the Ho Ho capital of America, eating more per person than any other city

The brand has survived quite a journey since this commercial. Hostess shut down in 2012 and Ho Hos disappeared from stores for a while, but new owners brought the familiar cakes back nationwide in 2013. Today Hostess is owned by the J M Smucker Company

For something that started as a hand-produced little cake in a San Francisco bakery, Ho Hos certainly became part of a lot of lunchboxes

Were you a Ho Hos kid, or did you reach for Twinkies or Ding Dongs instead?

Who remembers when Bugs Bunny was actually on the Kool-Aid package?

This commercial takes us back to around 1965, when Bugs and Elmer Fudd weren’t just Saturday morning entertainment — they were helping General Foods sell the relatively new Pre-Sweetened Kool-Aid

What I love is that they didn’t just drop the characters into a generic ad. Elmer is still chasing that “wascally wabbit,” Bugs is still one step ahead, and somehow the whole thing turns into a Kool-Aid commercial

Legendary animator Tex Avery, who helped shape Bugs Bunny’s personality years earlier, returned to direct some of these commercials. Mel Blanc was still Bugs, but Elmer was voiced here by Hal Smith, who many of us remember better as Otis Campbell on The Andy Griffith Show

Pre-Sweetened Kool-Aid itself was fairly new, introduced in 1964 so you no longer had to add your own sugar. Bugs became so closely tied to the product that his picture appeared right on the packages

And then this commercial gives us another nearly forgotten memory — Kool-Pops. The frozen treats had been around since at least 1960, giving General Foods another way to turn Kool-Aid into something kids could beg Mom to buy

It’s funny how one short commercial can bring back so much at once — Bugs and Elmer, the old Kool-Aid packets, Kool-Pops, and the days when cartoon characters regularly helped decide what ended up in the grocery cart

Do you remember Bugs Bunny on the Kool-Aid packages — and does anyone remember Kool-Pops?

Speedy Alka-Seltzer

How many of you remember Speedy Alka-Seltzer? By the time this 1976 commercial appeared, Speedy was actually making a comeback. He had been one of television advertising’s earliest memorable mascots during the 1950s and early ’60s before disappearing from regular Alka-Seltzer advertising in 1964.

Speedy was a pretty clever character when you look closely. His body was an Alka-Seltzer tablet, another tablet became his little sailor-style hat, and he was brought to life one frame at a time with stop-motion animation. He was originally going to be called Sparky, but the name was changed to Speedy to match the company’s “Speedy Relief” campaign.

And that wonderfully youthful voice belonged to Dick Beals, who was already an adult when he began playing Speedy. A glandular condition left Beals only about four-foot-six with a voice that never changed from childhood, and he turned that into an extraordinary career. He also originated the voice of Gumby and was the first Davey on Davey and Goliath. He eventually performed voices in more than 3,000 commercials.

This 1976 revival also brought Speedy together with the line most of us probably remember best — “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is.” The jingle was composed by Tom Dawes, who had previously been a member of the 1960s group The Cyrkle. Two years later, even Sammy Davis Jr. recorded his own versions of it.

Speedy had already shared the screen with silent-film legend Buster Keaton back in the 1950s, and he would eventually make another comeback decades later. For such a little guy, he had quite a television career

Did you remember Speedy himself, or is it the “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” jingle that immediately takes you back?

Shopping For Phones

Who remembers when we were finally able to go shopping for our own telephone?

For years, the telephone was basically part of your phone service. Ma Bell supplied it, you paid for it every month, and there usually wasn’t much reason to think of the phone itself as something you would go shopping for

That began changing in the 1970s with Bell PhoneCenters and all those new colors and styles. The transition was actually a little strange — with some early Design Line phones, you bought the decorative outer housing while Bell still owned and maintained the working parts inside. Eventually, complete customer-owned phones became the norm

And I’m sure many of us made sure that second or third phone had all the new bells and whistles — almost literally! Touch-Tone buttons, last-number redial, programmable memory dialing, speakerphone, mute, hold and answering machines became things to look for. Then there were telephone-company features like Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Three-Way Calling and Speed Calling. Caller ID came later and suddenly knowing who was calling before answering seemed absolutely amazing

What surprised me is how successful the shopping concept was. Bell reported in 1974 that 73 percent of PhoneCenter customers selected an extension phone, compared with 58 percent of customers using the old sales method. The stores let you actually see and touch dozens of phones instead of having somebody describe them over the telephone

And look at the variety in this commercial — colorful phones, fancy phones, character phones and phones designed to match the furniture. Bell even sold Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, Winnie-the-Pooh and that unforgettable doughnut-shaped Sculptura phone

Then almost overnight it seemed every department store had phones, and eventually nearly every phone came loaded with features we once thought were something special

What was the first telephone you remember actually buying instead of renting from the phone company?

Tiger Joe

As kids, we used to play army, and this commercial is a pretty good demonstration of what that looked like in the early 1960s. We sometimes make fun of kids today for fighting battles on video-game screens, but there’s an interesting full-circle connection — real warfare now makes extensive use of drones and other remotely controlled systems

The toy is the Tiger Joe Tank, introduced by Deluxe Reading in 1961. This was no little tabletop tank — it was about 26 inches long, moved by wired remote control and actually fired plastic shells. Deluxe even suggested putting a little flour or talcum powder in the barrel to create a puff of “smoke” when it fired

What really caught my attention is the line at the end: “Sold at food markets only.” Deluxe Reading deliberately sold many of its big toys through supermarkets. Those oversized colorful boxes could occupy the hard-to-use upper shelves, putting toys right in front of kids tagging along on the weekly shopping trip

Tiger Joe almost feels more like the kind of present Dad would have picked out, but the marketing actually put it directly in the path of whoever was doing the grocery shopping. I found a 1963 supermarket ad selling Tiger Joe for $12.88 — roughly $140 today — and you could leave a $2 deposit and have one held until Christmas

The company was founded by Henry Orenstein, who years later helped bring the idea that became Transformers to Hasbro

Did anyone get a Tiger Joe for Christmas — or spend the whole grocery trip staring up at one on the top shelf?

Don’t Blow Your Top

Don’t Blow Your Top came out in 1972, and this is one of those wonderfully simple toy ideas that probably didn’t need much explaining to a kid. You spun the spinner, added the required number of marbles to the character’s hat, and watched the pressure build on a real balloon hidden underneath. Eventually — POP! — somebody literally blew his top

The game came from Marvin Glass & Associates, the legendary Chicago toy-design company connected with Mouse Trap, Operation, Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, Lite-Brite and eventually Simon. They created and developed toy ideas, then licensed them to companies like Schaper to manufacture and sell

Schaper itself had quite a history. The company was founded by Minneapolis mailman Herb Schaper, whose homemade Cootie game became such a huge success that Schaper eventually promoted itself as “The Cootie Company,” just as we hear at the end of this commercial. The company also gave us familiar games like Ants in the Pants and Don’t Break the Ice

And I have to give them credit for the name. “Don’t blow your top” was already a familiar expression for losing your temper, so turning that into a game where the poor fellow actually blows his top was pretty clever

The game apparently had some staying power too, with advertising for it continuing several years after its 1972 introduction

Did anyone have Don’t Blow Your Top — and was waiting for that balloon to pop more fun than actually winning?

Peter Pan Peanut Butter

How many of you remember this Peter Pan Peanut Butter commercial? This one really seems to have stuck with people, and watching it again I can understand why. Instead of giving us a normal family making peanut butter sandwiches, they filled the commercial with recognizable characters and images including Peter Pan and Captain Hook, Beethoven, the Mona Lisa and even a hockey-masked horror character, all brought together by Peter Pan Peanut Butter

The biggest surprise for me is the music. That catchy “peanut, peanut butter” jingle wasn’t originally written for the commercial at all. The melody goes back to “(Baby) Hully Gully,” written by Fred Sledge Smith and Cliff Goldsmith in 1959. H.B. Barnum and Marty Cooper then adapted it into “Peanut Butter,” recorded by The Marathons in 1961, and that song eventually found another life in Peter Pan’s advertising more than twenty years later.

Peter Pan needed memorable advertising at the time, too. In early 1984, Skippy controlled about 40 percent of the national peanut-butter market and Jif had 17 percent, while Peter Pan was down around seven percent. So this wonderfully strange commercial was coming from a famous old brand trying very hard to get our attention, and I’d say they succeeded.

The brand itself goes all the way back to 1928 and was once the dominant national peanut butter. By the time this commercial appeared, Peter Pan was also changing corporate hands as Beatrice acquired Esmark, which explains that very familiar 1980s “We’re Beatrice” identification some of us remember seeing at the end of commercials.

Peter Pan advertising had also featured some familiar faces over the years, including Sterling Holloway, Alan Sues, Art James and later Perfect Strangers star Mark Linn-Baker. I tried to track down the performers in this particular commercial, but I couldn’t find a reliable cast list, so rather than guess at their identities or what became of them, I’m leaving that part as one of the mysteries behind the commercial.

Do you remember this one, and did that “peanut, peanut butter” jingle immediately come back to you?