A few years ago, I heard a snippet of music somewhere and it drove me buggo… I could recall hearing it years before, but couldn’t quite recall the context. It was right on the tip of my brain, shall we say. When, some time later, I found this commercial on Youtube, it was like a giant weight wasn’t just lifted from my brain, but leaped off of it.
Imagine my horror in noting that this commerical is more than a quarter century old.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqhUuH43LNM
And for those of you reading along who are too young ro remember this, perhaps not even having been born yet, a few things:
1) Shut up. Just shut the hell up, and git off ma lawn.
2) No, it didn’t make any more damned sense then than it does now. It was, I think, meant to be eye candy that caused you to turn to whoever was nearby and ask “Just what the hell was that about?” The result being that while the commercial didn’t make you want to buy any Chanel No. 5, the increased yappage about the commercial just might make you go buy some of that liquid stinkpretty anyway.
19 Responses to “Here, this’ll help you feel old…”
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I remember that song from Fallout 3! 😉
I’ll get off your lawn now.
It reminds me of the commercial for CANOE
Guy raises flag on boat “C”….. “Come on over…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3Ya2rpsdY
“E”… “Eccecterrra..Eccecterraaa…
Sounds like Al Bundy and his lost song “huh-huh-huh…him”.
I don’t think I ever saw this commercial, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the song predates it rather than being written for it.
Major-league crush on the girl in this commercial when I was a kid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_ikQNHfQ2c
Nothing like a 200-foot tall mod girl in a chrome minidress.
I think she later married The Jolly Green Giant, and is the mother of Little Sprout.
(The song is based on Petula Clark’s “It’s A Sign Of the Times” BTW)
JP wrote:
“It reminds me of the commercial for CANOE”
Want to see mini-cigar smoking Vikings on a dinky little longship*?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZaU_SFAww4
* “Shortship”? The big one was the “Long Serpent”… this must be the “Little Worm”.
I get a kick out of you thinking that something’s that’s over a quarter century old makes you _feel_ old. 😀
I’m over a half century old, and have indeed been around for over 1/5th of the entire history of the United States.
Regarding the commercial, women of the 1980’s would get this.
It’s floating around in a fantasy world, like the whole movie “Dressed To Kill” was. Took a girl to that, and she thought it was brilliant; I thought it was laughably bad.
Apparently, women of that time period spent most of their life in some sort of daydream that was completely detached from reality.
What’s he going to say to her next? What is this all about? It’s left up to the overheated imagination of the female target audience, but I guarantee you it’s going to be a very romantic, complex, and inevitably triumphant love story, with fights between them on the way.
Perfect male fantasy love story?
“Casablanca”.
He may love her, but he’s got to run off with some French guy to kill Nazis.
> I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the song predates it rather than being written for it.
It was originally done by the “Ink Spots” in, IIRC, the 1940’s.
I remember the ad, too. Also the Jolly Green Giant ad when Little Sprout
is in the swimming hole and says, ” I’m in the natural”.
Another ad but I don’t remember the name of the liquor which on the ad they say “It’s downright upright to ask a man over for a drink”. In 1980
the ad was most popular.
The Chanel commercial feeds the fantasy, which is what good commercials should do.
Pat, that’s a damn near perfect analysis of the attraction of movies. I’m gonna quote you about “Casablanca.” (What’s the perfect female fantasy love story?)
One of my lady friends asked me why I didn’t like chick flicks. I explained that the essence of chick flicks is that someone whines a lot and throws things but gets what they want without working for it or adapting to anything. “Notes on a Scandal” is a perfect example (we’d just watched that).
“It’s downright upright” seems to be Harvey’s Bristol Cream.
Want to feel old? Where you born after December 19, 1972? That’s the date the last Moon trip landed on Earth. If you were born after that date, you’ve never experienced in any way any space activity beyond LEO.
Viking? I was born in ’67 and I remeber Apollo, ASTP and Viking, Viking was cool because of the timig/distance, etc, etc….
As to perfect chick flick, you’d have to ask them, as I’m way out of my depth as to how exactly their minds work.
Someone once described Casablanca as having the near perfect plot outline, as most movies were:
Guy finds girl.
Guy loses girl.
Guy gets girl back.
…and Casablanca was:
Guy finds girl.
Guy loses girl.
Guy gets girl back.
Guy gives up girl for the good of all humanity.
…now how the hell can you beat that?
It’s a perfect male romantic fantasy; everybody but everybody in the movie knows that Rick is the greatest guy alive, and yet he neatly avoids getting stuck for life with Ilsa and makes a clean getaway to fight Nazis.
Hell, even Ilsa’s husband thinks he’s great despite the fact that he’s been cheating with his wife, and is obviously a lot better in bed than he is from the way she acts toward him.
What Rick is going to do when Louis tells him that _he_ wants to marry him is open to question, but they may both end up in that concentration camp that Victor Laszlo escaped from wearing pink triangles if they aren’t careful, “beautiful friendship” or not. 😉
I’ll ask my Internet girl friends about their perfect chick flick. This should be interesting.
One aspect of your analysis that one can be stuck with the girl. Ilsa didn’t come across as my ideal girl, but I’m sure there are good ones out there. It seems that there is a fairly large number of women who would be good enough to keep; you are correct in that there are no Nazis good enough for anything.
The commercial that started all this returns to mind: it’s a woman’s fantasy. She’s attractive to a man, but she really doesn’t have to do anything with him. Maybe I’ve been talking with women who have too much experience with men.
Oh, I got to hear the answer to that question about their choice of the perfect chick flick.
It’s bound to be something with a very torturous love story in it that may cover years, or even decades in time.
Who did that commercial a decade or so back that showed the guy and girl on the couch watching the movie about a romance on a ocean liner, and the guy is about to nod off…when suddenly this submarine periscope rises out of the water near the ship…and then he’s very interested again. 😀
I can guarantee you that James Cameron saw that, and immediately had a thought: “Replace U-boat with iceberg! Instant winner!”
Ilsa would make a crappy wife.
You can see where that would end up a decade or so down the line, when every time Rick does something that pisses her off…like leaving the toilet seat up… she’s going to be reminding him that Victor Laszlo would never have done something like that, and maybe she should have stayed with that saint-like man instead of the likes of Rick.
Although Steven Spielberg apparently has the patent on Nasty Nazis at the moment, (although that one in “Inglorious Basterds” is one of the scariest Nazis ever put on film… he can scare you shitless just by asking for a glass of milk) if you want to see a really fascinating and complex portrayal of a dedicated Nazi, check out the almost forgotten film “Swing Kids”.
Kenneth Branagh is the nicest, most upstanding person you ever ran into…but if you do something the Reich has declared illegal…well then… as much as he regrets having to do it, he may have to ship you off to a concentration camp. But first he will explain to you why what you are doing is wrong, and why as a good Aryan you should stop doing it before it comes to that.
But when push comes to shove, you are going to be going to the camp, because you were keen on degenerate music.
BTW; want to see one of scariest things I’ve ever come across in recent years?
Get ready to meet the insignia of the Russian National Bolshevik Party:
http://trcs.wikispaces.com/file/view/800px-National-Bolshevik-Party.png/39252708/800px-National-Bolshevik-Party.png
…this shit we don’t need, any more than we need someone to cross scorpions with locusts via genetic manipulation to see if they can actually get those things from The Book Of Revelation to start flying around. 😉
I remember the old Drakkar Noir commercial with the black cigarette boat with the red seats and all–and the one where some dude dives in, then disappears or whatever. I had been thinking about those old comercials myself for some reason.
Been watching “Telefon” or Manchurian Candidate too much. Must be the signal…
I got two votes for chick flicks. Both say “Steel Magnolias” was a great movie. (One women told me that it showed how women were stronger emotionally than men. I agree with her, but only because I have come to believe that women don’t really feel any emotion.) One woman said “On Golden Pond” was the best. “Sweet,” funny,” and “sad” are words they used most frequently.
More, as it arrives.