The job of ads is to embed itself in your psyche (a Media Buyer told me a broadcast ad isn't really absorbed 'til you've been exposed to it 22 times.) And once there, so often they remain, undisturbed until one day, by chance, they're awakened and revived. Perhaps by some Ad writer in a blog.
Here are a few Christmas ads, retrieved as much from my cranial storage locker as from YouTube. Like so many others- maybe even you- I can sing along, and recite the script word-for-word, some four decades later.
Pop-O-Matic Trouble *Sigh* To return to a simpler day when the suffix "O-Matic" carried enough heft to win consumer buy-in. Washed out colour and a yucky audio track won't encumber the rush of memories lashed to this spot. If you know it, I'll give six-two-and-even you know it verbatim.
LITE BRITE I wouldn't have bought the '45, but again, I remember every note, and every word. As, I'm sure, do all my former Grade 4 classmates of Pleasantville Public School. Bonus points for working "outa sight!" into the lyrics, man.
HOT WHEELS I cannot tell a lie; I don't remember any Hot Wheels ads. (Hmmm. And they don't seem to have had a jingle, like other spots cited here. Interesting.) But I know this: in my world, your status was tied directly to your Hot Wheels car collection. (As a member of the Hot Wheels club, I was issued a collector's edition Boss Hoss Silver Special, thank you for asking.)
ACTION JACKSON Wasn't my brand. But again, the jingle is Krazy-Glued to the floor of my cranial attic. My guy was busy making life safe for democracy... on the Moon:
Major Matt Mason With a jet pack operated with strings that became instantly tangled. And rubber arms and legs kept in shape by a subcutaneous wire which, like a subcutaneous clothes hanger, would eventually snap when bent back and forth too many times, causing the limb to stick out permanently in some strange direction. (One day, when I reach my own personal expiry date, and a team is sorting through the goods in my rambling estate, tossing to the furnace items too small, even for Kijiji, one will pause to reflect upon a Major Matt Mason action figure with a wonky arm- my own personal Rosebud- before dispatching it into the flames.)
These vintage ads, revived on YouTube, are to the TV generation what the coveted pages of the old Eaton's catalogue were to generations past.
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