Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From The Ad Tycoons Of Yesteryear!, June 28, 2004
I want to add my nod of approval to those of the other reviewers who found this collection worthwhile.Yes, this looks like, as Johnny Legend would say, "a below Low-Budget but just a step above No-Budget masterpiece!" Simple but pleasing cover design, minimal printed info inside, but a well categorized collection of classic TV ads swept from Americana's memories and possibly "this close" to being tossed into the fires of video-tape extinction. Many of the the ads here look like bad 3rd generation transfers from neanderthol VCRs, but the fact that these survive on VHS & DVD at all is just plain cool. You can find TV Ad compilations out there with clean video copy for a select few of the bigtime sponsors from yesteryear. What is harder to come across is the plethora of lesser known commercials. The prime example, from the annals my 1970s youth, are the "Not Another Hamburger!" ads by Der Weinerschnitzel, the coolest being Dracula rising out of his coffin, looking up, and gasping in horror, crying "NO! NO! Anything but that....NOT ANOTHER HAMBURGER!" I honestly thought I was the only TV obsessed adult who still had that catch-phrase imprinted in my pop-culture memory bank. You get a detailed look at TV commercial past with the now outlawed cigarette ads, the most mind-bending and hysterical being the spot for Winston Cigarettes featuring..... The Flintsones! If you have not seen this ad where Fred and Barney sneak into the backyard for a Winston break, then you must pick up this DVD. The Flintsones peddling tobacco on its own is worth the price for Classic Commercials! As many commercials that are featured on this DVD, I can't help but thinking... how many more commercials--- advertising national as well as regional products--- are lying dormant in video vaults, missed, forgotten, overlooked by everybody from DVD producers to pop-culture historians? There are some hep companies, most notably "Something Weird Video," who have revived multitudes of forgotten B-Movie classics and public service films from the video graveyards, and given them a new lustre. I hope more commercials like the ones in this "Classic Commercials" collection, whether the video quality is clean or thrashed, surface on DVD.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"From the land of sky blue waters", March 18, 2004
This 2 DVD set is a fun collection of commercials for all sorts of products dating from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first DVD has 9 chapters including Cigarettes & Cigars, Cleaning products, Cosmetics & Medications, Clothes & Accessories, Electronic appliances, Automobiles, Toys, and Public Service Announcements. The second DVD, which I think is the most fun, has four chapters: Food & Drugs, Celebrities, The Drugstore, and Horror and Sci-Fi. The menu pages are well done and cute with television sets flipping through a selection of commercials complete with static.There are over 200 commercials here. Highlights include: an S.O.S. "opera" ad on the Garry Moore show, a live demonstration of a Westinghouse refrigerator where the hostess can't get the door open "somebody's playing games," Arthur Godfrey's frank advertisement for Lipton chicken noodle cup of soup on the Talent Scouts show "there's chicken, you won't find it but it's there," a surprising sing-along public service announcement for V.D., the Flintstone's advertising Winston cigarettes (imagine cartoon characters doing that today!), the cute Quisp cereal guy plus Frankenberry, Boo-berry, and Count Chocula, commercial legends Mr. Whipple ("please, don't squeeze the Charmin") and Rosie ("Bounty: the Quick picker upper"), the famous crying Indian for a pollution public service announcement (one I actually remember!), and a bizarre slogan for Crest toothpaste ("I only got one cavity!"--I guess Crest wanted to leave a little room for error). Some of the best celebrity spots include the Monkees for Kool-Aid in 1969 after Peter Tork left the band (either Instant Replay or Monkees Present era), the 5th Dimension for Jell-O, the Three Stooges for Simoniz, Andy Griffith and Don Knotts for Post Grapenuts, Lucy and Desi for Philip Morris ("Call for Philip Morriiiis"), Chico and Harpo Marx for Prom home perm (they must have really needed the money, maybe for Chico's gambling debts), Buster Keaton for Hamm's beer, Gale Sayers and Tom Seaver for Phillips 66, Jimmy Durante for Scotties tissues, Dinah Shore for the upcoming '59 Chevy--the list goes on. Quality is not the best here but, considering the material, it is understandable. Editing is also a problem as clips of the show or commercial that follows the featured commercial are sometimes left on. Another editing error: the screen shots on the back case of disc one are of commercials that are on disc 2 and vice versa. Numerous renditions of nearly the same commercial (i.e. Crest, Safeguard soap, Puffs tissues) sometimes bog down the viewing. If you are interested in old commercials, however, you cannot beat the price of this set. Hopefully, someone will put out a set of old commercials with information like the year it came out, the climate of the times that affected the style and message of the commercial (i.e. the economy), who the celebrity spokesmen are (some I could not recognize, and they are not listed on this set), etc. Until then, this is a fun set and a nice time machine. Now let's see some '80s commercials that I will remember!
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vivid window on another state of mind, July 15, 2003
As other reviewers have stated, the picture quality here is indeed horrible. I am pretty generous with Lo-fi visual resources, and couldn't imagine it being as bad as they said. But they are correct, without exaggeration. Most of the visuals here are murky, artifact-filled, distorted in color, intermittently ghosty, contrasty and in and out of focus (though mostly out). The quality doesn't really stand up even at the postage stamp-sized viewing window of the typical internet Quicktime trailer. It's that awful. You are going to have to work with this set, and want to like it a lot. Which I did. It's a testimony to the strength of the basic content that these problems don't come close to destroying the smile-inducing curiosity and nostalgia inherent in the material. If you want it to be 1962 again, or if you are a student of advertising, popular culture or the history of television-- and you can overlook abysmal picture quality-- these disks deliver. There is a longer Speedy Alka Seltzer spot than I have ever seen, some very cool minimal Tom Terrific- or UPA-style animation. Great advertising characters abound (included is that venerable icon of political incorrectness, the Frito Bandito, voiced by the great Mel Blanc). And if you've read reprints of MAD magazines first ten years, you will be able to view, possibly for the first time, some of the targets of their most memorable advertising satire (the Bandaid boiling egg test), as well as some of those bizarre cryptic references in Bill Elder and Harvey Kurtzman's zany, teeming panels ("...the foaming cleanser, BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM BOMMM..."; "How're you fixed for blades, man?"). Arthur Godfrey appears here as the style of soft sell pitchman probably known to recent generations only through Paul Harvey. (The goal was to seem to capture the pitchman, taking a break from his show, in a casual conversational mode about a product he actually used.) Even with the image quality issues, I recommend this set. It's amusing, innocent fun, occasionally borderline embarrassing, and often rather surreal. In the end, it's revelatory. --You may find yourself wondering, were we ever really this unself-conscious, this unironic, this innocent? I know how I'd answer those questions. But take a look and decide for yourself. PS: The single content quibble I have with the collection, by the way (which may be major to you) is that there are surprisingly few cereal commercials here. When I think of childhood, I probably think of those entertaining animated cereal commercials, even ahead of toy commercials.
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DVD ~ Classic TV Commercials
