Here’s a wonderful fifteen minute reel of TV commercials from 1965. This is what the world looked and sounded like when I was one year old. It was a world of Ford Mustangs, cigarettes, new pocketbook sized cameras, cleaning products advertised by housewives talking to each other in kitchens and
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?
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
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
It seems wholly unbelievable that the delicious, nutritious and frequently super-high end fish known as the Tuna was once so obscure to Americans that the company who first introduced a canned, chopped version of it for sandwich use–Van Kamp was their name–thought it best to explain to consumers that it
Here’s a nice trip to the not-as-recent-as-you-might-think past. We’re in 1986 (back when we were young and happy) and it’s midnight in New York City. ‘The Honeymooners’ has just ended–it aired from 11:30-midnight, following the 11PM ‘Odd Couple’ rerun. I’m lying in bed, watching commercials and probably still reasonably high
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