Here are eight minutes of television commercials from 1964 (the year I happened to be born in). Plenty of animated cereal commercials, innocuous Bactine and Lipton tea spots and such. I’ve always felt that TV (and magazine) ads are a surefire way to experience the culture of a given period
This slick, early 60s-ish, commercial for Rice Krispies puts to bed once and for all the myth that Rice Krispies weren’t hip and cool and that the folks who ran Kellogs were a pack of capital ‘S’ Squares. Who supplied the swinging voices and accompaniment for this abjectly cool ad?
The ‘Hottest Man in The Band’ was a gimmick number performed by Walt Roesner and the Capitolians, a west coast band inexplicably named for their long-standing gig at the Capitol Theater in New York. Don’t ask me why. That’s what slim information the internet produced regarding this very fine musical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAG2omxiR-ohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA-KIaNmcE8 The main thing I remember about the children’s toy Lite Brite was that it never worked. Not mine, not my friends, not anyone’s who I knew. The pegs didn’t light up, the back of the thing fell apart easily, the bulbs weren’t even included with the set–which led to
It’s been said that MGM was where comedy went to die. Certainly that was the case with the Marx Brothers, whose final three MGM films were all abject unfunny failures. ‘Our Gang’ also suffered an ignominious end, morphing into a group of do-gooder kids who were eager to put on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb_HyDvUcGAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TrpjKelALc When I was a kid I was deeply involved with playing ragtime and stride piano, having learned how to do it by putting my fingers on our player piano while a roll played and seeing where the keys depressed and how the whole business of two-handed jazz piano worked.
If you’ve never been told the deeply emotional and truly profound story of the birth, success and death of the junk food Los Angeles stop ‘Pup N’ Taco’ then look no further. The above mini-doc lays out the whole sordid tale. Actually Pup ‘N Taco served excellent chili dogs to
Here’s another brilliant SCTV sketch from their early 80s network show, featuring a production of ‘Death of A Salesman’ starring Ricardo Montalban, Margaret Hamilton, George Carlin and DeForrest Kelly, with a special appearance by John Belushi. Rick Moranis’s wonderfully cruel spoof of Carlin in this period reminds us that Carlin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idw8JLe_r_8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOG_8JZy_g Carole Lombard died tragically in an air accident on January 16, 1942, just over one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. She was returning from an enormously successful war bonds tour– she was in the vanguard of Hollywood stars helping to raise money for the war effort–and the
This little mini-doc appears to be a 1965 travelogue of the Austran city Salzburg, birthplace and home of Mozart. In fact, they bury the lead and about three minutes in it’s revealed to be a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of ‘The Sound Of Music.’ Charmian Carr, who played Liesl