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.
4 Comments
10/8/2022 02:42:40 pm
Wonderful to watch! Thank you, Bob! I wish I got the references to all those other commercials. The older woman who asks "Who was that masked man?"-- was she some celebrity impossible not to know, do you think? I liked seeing the student with encyclopedias identified as Donovan Freberg. I went to Facebook to see if he was there, and yes, he has a non-private account; one mutual friend with me. Though there was no reason to expect any, I was a little surprised there weren't more.
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Robert Elisberg
10/8/2022 04:16:25 pm
Paul, we aims to please. The "Who was that masked man?" exchange joke had nothing to do with the actress delivering the line -- it was just an allusion to a cliche line from "The Lone Ranger." Whether it was ever actually said, I don't know -- I suspect it was -- but the cliche was that after the Lone Ranger saved someone, the person would say, "Who was that masked man?" And another would reply, "I don't know, but I wanted to thank him." So, Freberg just used it right after having the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the ad.
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10/9/2022 11:57:06 am
This is a wonderful collection of commercials. They don't make them like that anymore.
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Robert Elisberg
10/9/2022 12:17:50 pm
Robin, thanks for your note. Yes, they're absolutely special. The only thing I'll add is that, these being from Stan Freberg, they didn't even make them like this back then. He was unique at the time and really the "bad boy" of advertising, having made the great "Green Chri$tma$" comedy record in 1958 that shredded advertising at Christmas, which got banned on a lot of radio stations.
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AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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