We'll Be Right Back After This Very Long Commercial Interruption...
Well, this is quite the joy. A full 14 minutes of uninterrupted TV commercials.
No, really, it's pure joy because they're not just any TV commercials, but ads made by the master, Stan Freberg. Some of these, many people will remember. A lot will be fresh. All will be a total treat.
A few items of note as you watch.
1:30 -- This was one of Freberg’s more popular campaigns, for Sunsweet Prunes. Very low-key for his work, and very funny. That’s Freberg as the offscreen voiceover interviewer. You can see it in the freeze-frame below.
7:20 – One of Freberg’s most-famous and off-beat campaigns was for the introduction of Jeno’s Pizza Rolls. The series of thoroughly offbeat ads initially began with a satire of a commercial then-running for Kent cigarettes. For those, signs were held up on the street saying “Show us your Kent cigarettes” while the William Tell Overture played, and the public “supposedly” grabbed their Kent packs to show to the passing camera.
9:20 – the fellow on left is Bill Idelson, who’s an interesting fellow. He began his career as a kid playing the son ‘Rush’ on the radio classic series Vic & Sade. As an adult, he became a TV writers and wrote a lot of episodes of the Dick Van Dyke Show. But he is probably most recognized today for appearing in a few episodes of the Dick Van Dyke Show as Sally Roger’s sometime boyfriend Herman Glimscher.
10:25 – another of the Jeno’s ads which takes a lot a digs at other commercials which were running at the time.
11:30 – This may be Freberg’s most famous TV ad, although a lot of others compete for that honor. But it definitely got the most press attention, and, at the time when it was made in 1970, it was the most expensive TV commercial by anyone, costing $154,000. (Again, that's in 1970 dollars, so probably around a million dollars today.) It’s to introduce Heinz Great American Soup, which were trying to compete with Campbell’s Chunky Soup. The ad feature MGM legend Ann Miller and had choreography by Hermes Pan, who most-famously worked with Fred Astaire on 17 movies and won an Oscar with two other nominations.
12:30 – Freberg usually did voiceovers in his ads, but he appears on camera here.
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