R.I.P. the great Burt Bacharach. Here’s a commercial front the late 70s featuring Burt and then-wife Angie Dickenson shilling for Martini &Rossi Vermouth. The dashing Burt (he always makes me think of cologne, elaborate shaving gear, highly polished Italian mens boots etc.) once provoked a famous Sammy Cahn crack: ‘Songwriters
It’s said that there is always time for one of three things: a cup of coffee, a bite of cheese, and a vintage airline commercial. Actually, that’s not really said by anyone. But a vintage airline commercial (or infomercial as is the case with the above) is a refreshing three-minute
Yesterday I posted a late 1960s Volkswagen TV ad featuring a young (and very funny) Dustin Hoffman. Apparently, fifteen or so years later, Hoffman remembered the ease with which he’d picked up a few shekels by pimping himself out for a car he would never drive and put the word
The VW Fastback Sedan–a car you simply never see on the road anymore–received a big boost when newly famous star of ‘The Graduate’ Dustin Hoffman became the car’s key pitchman. Hoffman is still so close to his ‘Graduate’ persona that watching the commercial makes it seem like Benjamin Braddock found
Here are two mid-1960s Ginger Ale commercial spots, both of which use the same hipster narrator and Heffner-esque ‘Penthouse After Dark’ tone. The campaign line here is ‘one gulp is for thirst, the other gulps are for kicks’. We are deep in groovy mid-century party-land, with sexy chicks wearing striped
Before directing ‘The Deer Hunter’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’, Michael Cimino was a highly successful director of hip and groovy 1960s television commercials. Although he technically was part of an all-in-one advertising/production house called Madison Pollack and O’Hare (MPO), he apparently was always a step outside of the group, marching to
As I said yesterday in the post about gigantic cassette tapes from the 1950s, mocking old technology (and the awe and wonderment that accompanied it when it was new) is low-hanging fruit. But it isn’t just for a laugh that we marvel at yesterdays technical detritus. It also serves to
What happened to the massive cassette tapes pictured in the above posted RCA promotional film about the ‘revolution in tape?’ Huge consoles seemed to hold four of these biggies which required no threading–imagine! It’s easy to be amused by dead technology but this one is a real puzzler. Did it
Ten or so years prior to the delightfully comedic Peter Sellers TWA ads of the mid 1970s that I posted yesterday TWA had a different vision of how to present itself to the public. Above is a one-minute ‘informercial’ ad from 1961 featuring Miss Mary Ann Lynch in a ‘day
The great Peter Sellers picked up a little bread and butter cash doing a series of ads for TWA in the mid-seventies and the first of the above posted ads, where he plays an Italian ‘Via Veneto or Bust’ swinger, was one of my favorite ads of my childhood. This