Nostalgic Commercials!

[Lexi Darling]

Over the past couple years I've developed a peculiar nostalgia for the commercials of my childhood and adolescence. It's really interesting as a media historian to see trends in aesthetics change over the years, and I can't help but have some pretty visceral reactions to some mid to late 90s commercials I was inundated by as a kid, like seeing this somehow regresses my brain to that age for a split second.

If you were watching kids TV in the 90s, you remember this one. I know you do.

This one too, probably.

And here's one that I unironically love in retrospect as an adult new age junkie.

Hopefully you can bear with the stench of capitalism long enough to share your favorites.

[Psy-Fi]

60 Vintage Boys Toys Commercials 1950's-70's Mattel Ideal Remco Marx and More!



The 50's were before my time but I remember a lot of these from my childhood. Me and my friends had some of them when we were kids and I still have a few that managed to survive my childhood, stashed away.

[Suburban Placeholder?]

Here's a couple of ads from my childhood by the same company from the early to mid 80s.

This is for a couple of local supermarkets run by a retired army Major who also insisted on doing his own voice overs too.

Every day from 6pm when we would all be eating dinner and my Dad would be watching the local regional news suddenly you would get Major Stuart Benest barking meat and wine prices at you as if he was demanding you to drop and give him twenty.

The team making his ads tried to get him to do something else, but the Major flat out refused and insisted on doing it his way, which he did until his retirement in the mid 90s.

Go up to anyone in my area who grew up in the 80s and bark at them 'BENEST OF MILLBROOK' and you'll get a reaction.

[Lexi Darling]

@Psy-Fi , that is an awesome collection! Almost an hour, wow. I skimmed through a couple random ones and I landed on the toy gun commercial at 34:20. Holy crap. Back in the 90s when I was a kid our toy guns had to all be neon green and orange or something in order to make them kid-friendly, the 50s were hardcore.

@Suburban Placeholder? , I absolutely love that honestly. Matter of fact, straight to the point. More commercials should be that succinct. When I think of how over-the-top a lot of commercials from the 90s and beyond are, that super serious tone is actually funnier to me than the wacky, "funny" commercials purely due to the extreme contrast, haha.

[Psy-Fi]

@Psy-Fi , that is an awesome collection! Almost an hour, wow. I skimmed through a couple random ones and I landed on the toy gun commercial at 34:20. Holy crap. Back in the 90s when I was a kid our toy guns had to all be neon green and orange or something in order to make them kid-friendly, the 50s were hardcore.

Yeah. Those old toy guns and the commercials for them were pretty wild in comparison to what has changed and been allowed over the past few decades.

[Meatwad]

And some people say marketing is easy....... 

Swatch

Red House Furniture

[Lexi Darling]

Haha, this is my favorite of those Rhett and Link commercials.

"So come on down and get yourself a home. Or don't. I don't care."

[Meatwad]

That Cullman one is good too. One of the guys I know in one of my Facebook groups lives in Cullman and he first brought our attention to the add. Quite a similar character to Robert Lee too.

The other Rhett and Link commercials I like are the "Say no to crack, say yes to rollerskating" one and "Shift it". The highlight of the rollerskating one has to be the random 20-something employee (possibly the owners son) appearing from nowhere to say "no to unplanned pregnancy" in the middle of all the kids responses  . Another quality effort.

Roller Kingdom

Shift It

[innerspaceboy]

I have a stockpile of retro commercial jingles. I built a server I named "RetroBox" with over 200 complete Saturday morning cartoon / live action kids television series with every known season of each show. My plan was to port a 24-hour stream to an old 80s console CRT TV set and have a script running that intermittently inserts archival footage of adverts which would have aired during that era, but I haven't worked that part out yet.

Here are a few of my most beloved retro adverts. (Hidden so I don't overwhelm your browser - click to show.)

The top YouTube comment for the Batman & Robin Pop-Tarts commercial made me laugh out loud - "Wow this commercial is better than THE MOVIE!"

Spoiler

Mac Tonight Commercial (8K 60fps)

YoYo Ball from Marchon commercial (1991)

Hershey's Whatchamacallit Commercial HD

1993 - Skittles - How Many Combinations Commercial #1

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese - Teddy Bears and Dinomac commercial (1991)

1991 - Fruit Stripe Gum - Yipes! Stripes! Commercial

Fruity Pebbles - Rap Master Commercial

Nintendo Cereal System with Super Mario and Zelda Commercial (1989)

Mouse Trap Commercial 1990

Fester's Quest Commercial

Batman & Robin Pop-Tarts commercial

Nick at nite (1980s-1990s, United States, Troglodyte)

1988 Wrigley's Big Red Gum Commercial

The National Arbor Day Foundation: "Trees are terrific!" (1986)

[close]

[Lexi Darling]

Awesome collection, @innerspaceboy !

I had a Mac Tonight figurine as a kid, my across-the-street neighbor's dad was the manager at a McDonald's and had a fair bit of promotional stuff and he gave me that.

The Nintendo cereal one reminds me of this commercial for the original Legend of Zelda, definitely a personal favorite. "Your parents help you hook it up!"

[innerspaceboy]

That's a hilarious ad! And coincidentally, a shot of Mac Tonight McDonald's premiums appeared in my social media feed this morning! Were these the ones you had?



Last night I started researching the history of merchandising to try and identify where it first began. I recall Star Wars being the first film I remembered to introduce a toy line, which then exploded in the 80s with entire cartoon series being produced to promote lines of action figures, (Transformers immediately comes to mind), but I learned that there were others decades earlier. These included but were not limited to:

- Little Orphan Annie
- Mickey Mouse
- Buck Rogers
- Looney Tunes
- Hopalong Cassidy
- Red Ryder
- 1930s Marvel comics
- Howdy Doody
- Davy Crockett
- James Bond
- Elvis Presley
- early Muppets
- Smurfs
- Paddington Bear
- Hanna-Barbera characters
- Barbie
- The Beatles
and many others.

I'm having fun exploring it!

[Lexi Darling]

Ah, cool coincidence there for sure. I don't recall mine having a vehicle, I'm pretty sure he had the classic black suit and sunglasses and was in some generic standing pose.

It's cool to look back at toy tie-ins throughout the decades. I was born in 1989, so I missed the peak of Transformers and My Little Pony and such. The main kids show of my childhood that was successful at selling me toys was Power Rangers. I have the possibly-dubious honor of having tuned in during the original airing of its first episode on Fox Kids back in 1993, and for the next five or so years I spent so much of my allowance on those toys.

[innerspaceboy]

I was struck this morning by remembrances of the trend of zero-budget television in the 90s. The ultimate example was The Sifl & Olly show on MTV. (I'm a card-carrying Sockhead and have all 3 seasons on DVD.)



Advertisers tried to cash-in on the trend, and a few had great success. The two most-memorable of which are:

Pizza Hut - Pizza Head Show compilation

and Quiznos Subs

Curiously, just 3 months ago marked the return of the Spongmonkeys with a new Quizno's advert in the classic style.

Good times.

[Lexi Darling]

Hahaha, good old spongemonkeys. Though AFAIK they were actually not originally created as an ad campaign, they're from RatherGood dot com, a delightfully unhinged flash cartoon site that I was a big fan of in the early 2000s.

Tales of the Blode was the best thing on that site.

[innerspaceboy]

Quite correct - "We Love the Subs" was directly based upon Veitch's earlier song "We Like the Moon."

Joel Veitch's rathergood website was a fantastic source for experimental comedy videos much like Newgrounds, eBaumsworld, JoeCartoon, weebls-stuff, Albinoblacksheep, Homestar Runner, and a gaggle of others.

There was nothing else quite like it before or since.