vintage advertising Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

“Ever Eat a Pine Tree?” — The Commercial That Turned Euell Gibbons Into a Punchline

This may be one of those commercials where one sentence became much more famous than the product being advertised.

Euell Gibbons looks into the camera and asks:

“Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.”

And if you were watching television in the early ’70s, apparently there was no escaping what happened next!

I found contemporary FTC records for this exact Grape-Nuts commercial dating it to 1972, even though it’s often identified today as a 1974 spot. Gibbons wasn’t some eccentric actor they hired either. He was a respected author and wild-food expert whose Stalking the Wild Asparagus had been around since 1962.

But that pine-tree line turned him into a pop-culture phenomenon.

John Byner spoofed him on The Carol Burnett Show, Johnny Carson made tree-eating jokes, and Match Game used Euell Gibbons repeatedly as material. One question joked that he had eaten the television camera! Even The Electric Company created “Early Gibbons,” who ate stumps, sticks and stones.

Gibbons even got into the act himself. When Sonny and Cher handed him what appeared to be a wooden plaque, he took a bite out of it. It was actually made to be edible.

And all those jokes certainly didn’t hurt Grape-Nuts. By the end of 1973, the advertising trade press reported that his commercials had increased sales by about 30 percent.

There was one unexpected ending. In 1975, the FTC stopped commercials showing wild plants as edible because regulators worried children might imitate Gibbons and eat something dangerous.

More than 50 years later, say Euell Gibbons to someone who remembers the ’70s and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll answer with something about eating a pine tree.

Do you remember the original commercial — or do you remember all the jokes about Euell Gibbons even more?

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?

Muriel Cigars — Edie Adams Made “Hey Big Spender” Her Own

Here’s one where the commercial spokeswoman may have become better remembered than the product.

Edie Adams spent an incredible 19 years selling Muriel cigars on television, and the Television Academy says Muriel’s sales increased more than tenfold during the years her commercials ran.

This spot uses “Hey, Big Spender” from the Broadway musical Sweet Charity, but with one perfect advertising change: instead of “spend a little time with me,” Edie sings “spend a little dime with me” because a Muriel Corona cost ten cents.

And apparently that little change caused quite a stir. I found that Universal filed suit in 1968 trying to stop the cigar company from using the Big Spender parody in its advertising.

Edie herself had quite a résumé. She was Juilliard-trained, won a Tony Award for Li’l Abner, appeared in movies including The Apartment and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and was married to television comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs.

Here’s the part I really didn’t know: she never smoked. Adams later said the Muriel cigars never even touched her lips, and she devised a special ring to hold one convincingly for the commercials.

She also did something television historians owe her a lot for. After Kovacs died, Edie fought to locate and preserve his old programs at a time when networks were routinely erasing or throwing television recordings away. More than 1,200 items from the Kovacs-Adams collection eventually went to the Library of Congress.

Not bad for someone many people simply remember as “the Muriel cigar lady.”

Do you remember Edie Adams herself, or is it “Hey, Big Spender” that immediately brings these commercials back?

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”?

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?

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?

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?

Joe DiMaggio as the face of Mr. Coffee

When this ad aired in 1974, America was right in the middle of changing the way it made coffee. For generations, the kitchen percolator had been the standard. Then Mr. Coffee came along with automatic drip brewing, and Joe DiMaggio became the familiar, trusted face convincing people to give this new machine a try.

He didn’t exactly “kill” the percolator himself, but he certainly helped America move away from it. Mr. Coffee had only been introduced in 1972, yet by April 1974 the company had already sold its millionth machine.

One of my favorite details is that DiMaggio reportedly turned down the endorsement at first—and had actually won a Mr. Coffee machine at a golf tournament before the company ever approached him.

And here’s the best irony of all: the man who became one of the most famous coffee spokesmen in television history reportedly wasn’t much of a coffee drinker himself.

Do you remember when your family finally replaced the old percolator with a Mr. Coffee?