UPCOMING EVENTS

Watch this space!

YouTubery '85: Greasy Kid Stuff

I realize that the title to this post will probably land me on some Chris Hansen watch list.

All of the commercials collected here are aimed at kids, except for this very first one. I don't think I've seen anything truly like it before or since. It's an ad for Transformers, but it's targeted at adults, telling them that they better get Transformers right now--"right now" being weeks before Thanksgiving. Otherwise, you'll be shit outta luck at Christmas, and your kid will grow up to resent you and probably turn queer. (They don't say that, but I think it's implied.)

And who has been chosen to deliver this message? Why, none other than Alex Karras, ex-football great and Mr. Papadopolous from Webster . Who else?

A lot of toy trends have come and gone just in my lifetime, and I've seen commercials that very blatantly tried to whip up a frenzy of greed among kids. But this is the only example I can remember of a toy that insisted to parents, six weeks before Christmas, that you better get on the stick and spend, spend, spend now, Jack! The marketing guys at Hasbro had some chrome-plated balls on 'em.

I'll go ahead and tell you that Mr. Karras lip syncs the "robots in disguise" robot voice part of the Transfomers theme song. That may ruin the surprise, but it won't prevent the hilarity/horror you will feel upon seeing it. Trust me.

We like to think that only adults hang on to meaningless rivalries, but it starts much earlier than that. Transformers vs. Gobots is a big example from my youth. You had one or the other, period. Unless you were one of those rich kids whose dads bought them everything they wanted. In which case, I hate you.

I distinctly remember believing--with as much conviction as an 8-year-old can muster--that Transformers were vastly superior to Gobots in every conceivable way. This applied as much to their animated versions as it did to their toy forms. Anyone who preferred Gobots was obviously retarded.

Is that stupid? Of course it is. But is it any less stupid than feuds like Ford vs. Chevy? McDonalds vs. Burger King? Ohio State vs. Michigan? (and I say that knowing such a statement could get me murdered in several Midwestern states).

Here's a commercial for Gobots that helped firm up my childhood prejudices.

Toys R Us ran the same basic Halloween cartoon for years. While not exactly terrifying, it is a bit more sinister looking than most kiddie Halloween fare you see nowadays, where they show fangless vampires baking cookies with declawed werewolves.

Scarier than Toys R Us: "Manhunt for a renegade cop" promised by the CBS-2 news teaser at the end of the commercial.

A popular ploy in kids' food commercials goes thusly: this isn't just cereal/yogurt/applesauce, it's a portal to a whole fun dimension where anything can happen! All you need is your imagination!

Like in this Honeycomb commercial (one which does not feature the fabled Honeycomb Hideout). You can imagine that Honeycombs are anything you want them to be! That won't make them taste any better, but you pretend you're eating rocket ship!

My family didn't have a lot of money growing up, which meant that we didn't eat out very often. Going to fast food places was such a rare treat for us that when people told me they were going out for a special meal, I assumed they were going to McDonald's. Going to a for-real restaurant was totally beyond the pale, something you did once every five years, usually when somebody died.

I rarely felt deprived, but I did lust after Happy Meal toys. I suppose their exclusivity was the largest factor, because you couldn't just go out and buy them. So I'm glad to see a commercial like this with adult eyes, and know that all I really missed out on were tiny blobs of plastic crap.

In a similar vein, I really wanted a Power Wheels when I was a kid. And watching this commercial now...you know what? I still want one, dammit.

Although I question the theme song. "Power makes it go." What the fuck else would make it go?

I did not want Teddy Ruxpin, except to maybe test out the theory that it would lip sync to anything, including Weird Al tapes. But these two ads for the "talking" teddy bear would have you believe that it was the greatest invention in centuries, driving scientists mad and wowing kids at show and tell.

By the way, did anyone out there in Internetland actually have show and tell as a kid? 'Cuz I sure as hell didn't, and I've never met anyone who did. I demand that the show and tell scam be exposed!

I wish someone would do a study on Saturday morning cartoon bumpers. I'm convinced that they warped many an impressionable young mind. They always had weird geographic shapes, flashing neon colors, surreal editing, and lots of YELLING. Yes, I will watch The Smurfs, just stop screaming at me!

This example from CBS is relatively mild compared to some of its peers (as you can see here, here, and here). But it does feature a repurposed Cyndi Lauper song and the best seizure-inducing graphics 1985 had to offer.

After he lost his commission under mysterious circumstances, Captain Kangaroo (aka Bob Keeshan) retired to CBS, where he hosted the animated series CBS Storybreak . Basically, he introduced cartoons based on popular kids' books. Only one season of the show was produced, because apparently CBS couldn't market a Bob Keeshan action figure and battle castle playset.

Actually, there were multiple seasons of Storybreak if you count the early 90s revival with Malcolm Jamal-Warner. Which I do not. Fuck Theo.

Here's an ad for Speak and Spell, a learning tool that did pretty much what its name says it does. And it did it in a monotone, barely decipherable robotic voice. You'd often spell words wrong because you couldn't quite understand what the machine was "saying" to you. We had one in our house, and I used to flip out when I'd spell what I thought I heard correctly, only to have the machine tell me I was wrong. Little did I know this would help prepare me for an adulthood of bureaucratic hassles.

After years of abuse and neglect, the gigundo D-cell batteries in our Speak and Spell started to leak. This caused it to malfunction in bizarre ways. Most hilariously, you'd press a button, any button, and without warning it would start rambling nonsensically like a raving streetcorner derelict.

Once, it spat out a straight minute of jibberish that sounded like someone fast forwarding a cassette of a fascist dictator's speech. Then, it stopped and said very distinctly POTATO...POTATO...INCH. Then it shut off, and never worked again. Like a master performer, it new that what it just did could never be topped, and retired from the stage forever.

Me and my brothers absolutely lost it. We must have laughed for an hour, and every time we stopped, we'd think of it and burst into hysterics all over again. I think that is possibly the funniest thing that has ever happened in mankind's history.

But kids' commercials didn't just ask you to scream at your parents to buy stuff, or take you to McDonalds for Chicken Nuggets and childhood obesity. There were also PSAs, like the trio below imploring you to drink milk. They're kinda cute and wacky in a Pee-Wee's Playhouse kinda way. I don't know if they convinced kids to drink milk, but I'm sure they gave them a glimpse of future acid trips.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, me and my brothers decided that the word "rad" was hysterical. It was honestly cool for about three seconds, then got overused, then dumped into the catch phrase dustbin. So if something was powerfully uncool, we called it "rad."

Around the time we decided this, I was watching one of the old VHS tapes that spawned all of these YouTube posts, and I rediscovered a promo for a movie called Rad . My curiosity piqued, I went to our local video store to see if they had a copy rent. Lo and behold, they did! It was almost too good to be true!

Rad is pretty much what this commercial shows it to be: a shitty BMX movie starring a young Lori Loughlin. I was hoping for something so awful that it would give me some unintentional comedy, but all I got was a mediocre bike movie. Talia Shire plays the hero's mom, even though she doesn't appear in the ad. She was smart enough cash the check and have nothing else to do with the movie.

I resisted doing these 80s commercials posts because I thought people might interpret them in the vein of "ha ha! 80s = LOL". To me, the 80s were not a fun time. They were fucking terrifying.

Maybe childhood is always terrifying. I'm sure it's no picnic being a kid nowadays, what with the world being a powder keg while our president plays with matches. But since I was a kid in the 80s, I can only testify that the 80s were damn scary. The Cold War was escalating. Violent crime was rampant. Employment was way up. So was inflation. Drug dealers were waiting to get you hooked on The Dope. And if they didn't get you, Dungeons and Dragons would. There were child molesters lurking everywhere who'd lure you into a van and take you away and you'd never be seen again. Or so I was told.

And worst of all, you had to wear clothes like these. *shudder*

Posted 12.23.07 11:50am * Permalink

Copyright 2004-08 Scratchbomb Inc. Trespassers punished by catapault