A bunch of new reviews of old commercials for you today, with the products ranging from funny diet pills to invisible bear-shaped fruit snacks. If you’re new to the site and want to see more old commercials, I suggest clicking here and here and here. Awayyyyy we gooooo…
Consumers Catalog Showrooms: Oh God, how I loved Consumers. There weren’t a ton of Consumers stores across the world, but I was lucky enough to live ten minutes away from one. I was really young and the memories might be a bit rusty, but it worked like this: You’d go into this “store” that looked more like a Department of Motor Vehicles with a bunch of casino arcade prize shelves, and stand at a little podium filling out order forms from Consumers catalogs. Then you’d give the slips to one of the workers, and they’d reappear from the giant warehouse in the back with whatever you ordered.
The idea was that they could keep their prices down by doing away with extravagant store displays, but in practice, the whole thing kind of sucked. You’d spend twenty minutes filling out order forms and another hour waiting on lines, and half the time, most of what you wanted ended up being out of stock. This led to the entire Consumers business having a terrible stigma, but at heart, it was the company’s fault. The catalogs used to have these wild clearance sales with truly absurd low prices, and obviously, that’s why people were going to the stores. When everyone’s ordering the same shit, a single store can’t meet the demand.
Example? Okay. For three years in a row in the mid ’80s, the Consumers holiday catalog promoted Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos figures for forty-nine cents a pop. Each year, I’d make my mother take me there, and each year, there were no Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos in stock. I was too young to really understand the concept of misleading advertising and things being sold out, so I just assumed my mother was at fault and gave her shit for it.
Despite it constantly providing the retail equivalent of blue balls, I was totally fascinated by the stores. Click here to watch one of their old commercials, starring Shirley Jones as the odd celebrity spokesperson. The commercial’s boring as hell, but I can’t change that.
Berry Bears Fruit Snacks: In retrospect, the Berry Bears fruit snack brand was far more interesting than it seemed. In the beginning, it was just another everyday fruit snack based on another group of everyday generic characters. A family of bears, in this case. You had Ma Bear and Pa Bear, and Kid Bear and other Kid Bear.
Somewhere along the way, the people behind Berry Bears went completely insane and refused to allow a family of friendly bears to sell the product by themselves. Instead, they constantly implemented wacky “special edition fruit snacks.” In one commercial, they had the cartoon bears stumble upon some kind of holy flying horse to serve as an introduction to new “holy flying horse” fruit snacks. Picture that — you’d open a pack of Berry Bears, and it’d be 90% Humanoid Bear and 10% Flying Pegasus.
In the commercial featured here, the special edition snack was even weirder. Bobby Bear finds a jar of vanishing cream and makes himself invisible. Thus, packages of Berry Bears fruit snacks included random “Invisible Bobby” pieces, which were more translucent than actually invisible, but whatever.
I like to pretend that the Berry Bears production panel consisted of five old ladies and a California surfer with a can of Coca-Cola constantly in hand. Everyone had a say. The old ladies liked their nuclear family of fruity bears, but Surfer Dude was always around to spice things up with flying horses and invisibility creams, just because he was stoned and thought it’d be funny. Click here to see Bobby Bear go byebye!
Dexatrim: I have no idea if they still make Dexatrim, and I’ve never actually seen it in person. Still, I couldn’t have been the only kid who was enamored by the pills seen in commercials like this one. What were all of those little balls visible within the clear end of the pills? What did they do? I had no idea what an “appetite suppressant” was. I just figured that those little balls swam around stomachs attacking whatever food people ate, shrinking pot roasts down like salt on snow.
You might need some Dexatrim after tomorrow’s Megaparty entry. It’s a recipe. A greasy one. Stay tuned.
Posted by Matt. E-mail me!
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Awesome, first post, I think. Sorry Matt, didn’t read the article but I will after the first post glory wears off.