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 beverages. There’s a lot of crap coffee products with the satisfied customers acting as if they’d just tasted a fine wine filled with complex hits of blackberry, chocolate, tobacco etc. and a number of unimpressive juice drinks which seem to have been an almost new invention. Could Grapefruit juice in a can really have been such a big deal? Best of all is the final commercial on the reel for something called ‘Tom Piper’. I still can’t figure out what the drink is–the people singing the jingle are clearly non-pros (possibly husband and wife inventors of the drink?) and the man doesn’t even really get his mouth around the lyrics, leaving it to his oddly accented wife to carry things. I won’t even go into the milk commercial about a barn, a bunch of young rustlers and a bale of hay etc. Suffice to say, this is a glimpse into a very different America, with very different tastes and styles than the one we are currently stuck in.