When I was younger, a friend once told me that she only watched TV for the commercials. Being about five or six at this time, I obviously considered this statement to be completely unseemly, blasphemy even. How could those short little snippets, which interrupted all of my favorite TV shows, possibly be enjoyable?
As I got older, however, I started to see the value in commercials - they were bright, loud, exciting, but most of all, they were for products I wanted. You know what I'm talking about: those staples of the late '80s and early '90s that everyone wanted to have. Things like Gameboy, Bop-it, Ninja Turtles action figures, Stretch Armstrong and even the Nickelodeon-inspired Gak were introduced to me through the wide, wonderful world of commercials and subsequently appeared on my Christmas wish-list.
As I got older I realized an additional value of commercials - they were creative and usually pretty hilarious. However, looking at the commercials with which we are inundated today, I feel it's safe to say that TV commercials seem to have hit their peak in the late 1990s.
Take a look at commercials featuring personified animals. In 1995, during the Super Bowl, Budweiser unveiled its highly popular Budweiser frogs line of commercials. You know the ones I'm talking about: three frogs (conveniently named "Bud, "Weis" and "Er") sitting around on rocks in a swamp chanting their names. It was new, it was different, it was funny.
What do we have today? The Geico gecko. Sure, maybe it's nice to be told by a talking lizard that you could (and that's the operative word in those commercials) save 15 percent or more on your car insurance, but he has a British accent and attempts to be funny. Sorry Gecko, if you're not a member of Monty Python, the British humor probably won't work here - look at the success (and by "success" I mean "lack thereof") of Mr. Bean in America.
The point here goes to the frogs. And we need only look a little further to see Geico's other attempt at advertisement: the Cavemen. I'll admit, when I saw the first commercial in which the cavemen retorted Geico's statement that "It's so easy, even a caveman could do it," I chuckled. But now it just seems like overkill - they're even getting their own TV show, which is set to debut later this year.
Perhaps an even more memorable commercial from the late '90s was Budweiser's "Whassup!" commercial (I don't mean to endorse Budweiser, but they are good at this). I don't think a single person reading this could honestly say that, for months after the commercial's debut, all that could be heard in the halls of their school, on the sports field, in the mall, wherever, was that catchy phrase. And you know a commercial was popular when there were plenty of spin-offs: the Japanese restaurant cooks who exclaimed "Wasabi," the immensely popular YouTube video featuring Mario and other videogame characters and others.
I will defend one modern commercial. This commercial has spawned countless YouTube parodies and impersonators (including a crudely-made parody featuring Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean garb), and has even spawned a commercial sequel of sorts. It can be described, simply, as the "IDK, my BFF Jill?" commercial. You either love it or you hate it, though the prevailing opinion seems to be one of love. This commercial has it all: an appeal to younger generations through the use of Internet slang/abbreviations, as well as a "translation" (via captioning) for those who just might not understand.
Aside from this bright spot on the modern commercial radar, nothing else comes close to the great advertisements of the late '90s.
