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1980's
TV& Ads: Cal Worthington & His Dog Spot - 1984
Calvin Coolidge "Cal" Worthington is an American car dealer well-known throughout the West Coast of the United States, and to a more limited extent elsewhere due to minor appearances and parodies in a number of movies. He is best known for his unique radio and television advertisements for the Worthington Dealership Group. In these advertisements, he was usually joined by "his dog Spot," except that "Spot" was never a dog. Often, Spot was either a tiger, a seal, an elephant, a chimpanzee, or a bear. Even once, "Spot" was a hippopotamus, which Worthington rode in the commercial. On some occasions, "Spot" was a vehicle, such as an airplane that Worthington would be seen standing atop the wings of while airborne. "Spot" was officially retired in the mid 1980s, however he is mentioned in some commercials today.
Super Bowl: Hertz Commercial with OJ Simpson & Friends - 1984
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Here is a ad for Hertz I found on a old vhs. It features O.J. and Arnold Palmer with cameos by Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith living large on their Miller Lite "less filling, tastes great" fame. I wanted to doctor the commercial but it is pretty hilarious on its own. O.J. gets a litle irrate.
Simpson's amiable persona and natural charisma landed him numerous endorsement deals. He was a spokesman for the Hertz rental car company. He would be depicted running through airports, as if to suggest he was back on the football field.
Frank Zappa: Crossfire - 1986
Frank Zappa appeared on CNN's Crossfire and debated the issue with Washington Times commentator John Lofton in 1986. Zappa's passion for American politics was becoming a bigger part of his life. He had always encouraged his fans to register to vote on album covers, and throughout 1988 he had registration booths at his concerts. He even considered running for President of the United States. On September 19, 1985, Zappa testified before the US Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, attacking the Parents Music Resource Center or PMRC, a music organization, co-founded by Tipper Gore, at that time married to then-senator Al Gore. The PMRC consisted of many wives of politicians, including the wives of five members of the committee, and was founded to address the issue of song lyrics with sexual or satanic content. Zappa saw their activities as on a path towards censorship, and called their proposal for voluntary labelling of records with explicit content "extortion" of the music industry. In his prepared statement, he said:
K-Tel Rock 80 Album Commercial - 1980
K-tel International is an "As-Seen-On-TV" company, which is most noted for its compilation music albums.
New Wave is a genre of music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, and disco and 1960s pop music, as well as much of the original punk rock sound and ethos, such as an emphasis on short and punchy songs.
K-Tel has been in business since the late 1960s by Philip Kives. Kives, a demonstration salesman who had previously sold cookware door-to-door and in a department store, used television advertising in 1962 to sell Teflon-coated frying pans to a large-scale audience.
Kives bought and marketed a number of other products from Seymour Popeil, father of Ronco founder Ron Popeil such as the "Dial-o-matic," a type of food slicer that allowed the user to "dial in" the thickness of slices produced, the Veg-O-Matic, and the "Feather Touch Knife." The combination of inexpensive goods, mail-order distribution and a simple sales pitch were a novel combination in television advertising in the early 1960s. Kives took his "Feather Touch Knife" on the road to Australia starting in August, 1965 and by Christmas had sold one million knives with a net profit of one dollar a knife.
K-Tel was formally founded in 1968. After a successful decade in the 1970s, the company expanded rapidly.
In 1966, Kives released the company's first compilation album, a collection of 25 country songs titled 25 Great Country Artists Singing Their Original Hits.
Bill Cosby for New Coke - 1985
New Coke is the reformulation of Coca-Cola introduced in 1985 by The Coca-Cola Company to replace the original formula of its flagship soft drink, Coca-Cola (also called Coke). Properly speaking, New Coke had no separate name of its own, but was simply known as "the new taste of Coca-Cola" until 1992 when it was renamed Coca-Cola II.
