The 1970s were peak TV-watching years for me. I logged about five hours of TV a day–starting with old syndicated shows in the afternoons after I got from school, (Andy Griffith, Ozzie and Harriet etc.) moving onto dinner served on a stack table while watching The Three Stooges and ‘I
Here’s a continuation of yesterday’s reel of commercials, station I.D.s, intros and outros etc. from a 1967 CBS summer replacement show called ‘Away We Go’. There are almost no repeat commercials which makes for fresh, enjoyable views of what our culture looked and sounded like in that now-distant year. The
Here’s a twelve minute reel of intros, outros, station ID’s and commercials from a 1967 broadcast over the local Los Angeles CBS affiliate KNEXT. They appear to be part of an hour long summer replacement show called ‘Away We Go’ which features an awfully enticing cast–Buddy Greco, George Carlin, The
It’s hard for me to think of the 1990s as ‘period’. That was the decade in which I turned 30 and began having a professional life (of sorts) and feels to me relatively recent, not that far in my past. Of course that was thirty years ago–THIRTY YEARS AGO–and the
Here’s a reel of alternately funny, scary, disgusting or disturbing TV ads from the golden 80s. Lots of Cocaine and AIDS nostalgia, of course, and Brenda Vaccaro shilling for Tampons while inhaling through an iron lung in between sentences is pretty messed up. Cosby makes an appearance, natch, and a
A mere five years before portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt in the network mini-series ‘Eleanor and Franklin’, Edward Hermann portrayed “one of the country’s leading bachelors” in the very amusing Panasonic Stereo commercial posted above. We are deep in the early 70s groove here and Hermann’s portrait of the era’s swinging
The above 1973 commercial for a Pioneer home stereo system plays more like a current day SNL parody of a 1973 Pioneer home stereo system commercial than the real thing. Yet it’s the real thing. Did we really look, act and talk like that? The early 70s are becoming as
What kind of crap foods were people eating half a century ago? Consult the nifty little reel of commercials posted above to find out. Pizza rolls? Rice a Roni? Jello cheesecake anyone? Don’t mind if I do! The weird inclusion of a shaving cream ad at the end of the
Here’s a nice little reel of beverage commercials the late 1950s to mid 60s. If nothing else, this grouping of ads shows us how poor the ideas and execution of commercials were before they got jazzed up in the middle-60s, as well as how poor the public’s taste was in
I guess I always assumed that the Milton Bradley sung about on TV in commercials for games that I saw on TV as a youth was either the last two names of the men who invented the games (Bob Milton and Eddie Bradley), or the Anglicized name of a fat