Off the top of my head…
Yamaha! Won’t you fly me away
Today is the day
Don’t look the other way
Yamaha! Today is the day!
…
Get yourself a Honda
Built like a watch that was meant to last a hundred years!
…
Forget your troubles, get on Suzuki…
…
Kawasaki lets the good times roll
Get aboard, get away
And you’re gonna say
Let the good times roll!
…
Get a bucket of chicken
Have a barrel of fun
At Kentucky Fried Chicken
There’s fun for everyone!
…
Yes!
Denver, Phoenix, Reno
Yes!
Burbank, San Francisco
…
Yes!
Hughes Air West
Top banana in the West!
…
Good mornin’ world!
Good mornin’ to you-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoooo.
I’m a-wearin’ my Levi’s,
Lee-hee-hee-hee-hee-vi’s.
OK, that’s enough. A bit of a sampling of commercial jingles I remember from the '70s. It seems to me that commercials are less musical nowadays, and have been for quite some time. Sure, there are soundtracks. Some are instrumental, and some are popular songs. (I enjoyed hearing The Pogues used on a car commercial recently… the first dozen times I saw it.) But there seems to be few, if any, ‘commercial songs’ anymore.
I hesitate to call them ‘jingles’. To me a ‘jingle’ is a little song that appears along with an announcer. The first one that pops into my head is Chockfull-Of-Nuts. There’s the announcer talking about the product, and then ‘Chockfull-Of-Nuts is the heavenly coffee/Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy!’. What I’m thinking about are commercials that use the product-specific songs, often set to well-known tunes, that make up the bulk of the commercials’ audios.
On one hand, some of the commercial songs of my adolescence drove me nuts. Hated them. Mocked them. (c.f., Chockfull-Of-Nuts.) OTOH, how could I not think of the Yamaha song as I bounced across the desert on my Enduro? And others were just darned catchy. Maybe it’s just that with the Internet and so many choices of channels that don’t interrupt programmes with commercials so I tend to ignore ads until they’ve been played over and over and over, but current commercials seem less memorable to me. Sure I remember the ones for the online bank where the sleazy guy treats small children unequally, but darned if I can remember the company being advertised. I think that humans are generally hardwired to remember and respond to music, and that product-specific songs made/make it easier for people to remember the products. I mean, I’ll never fly Hughes Air West (since they no longer exist), but I remember the commercials and who they were for!
I’ll end with this: Sparkletts Water commercial. I still can’t hear the name ‘Leon’ without thinking of it. And I always think of it when I buy lamb shoulder. (Incidentally, was lamb easier to buy in the '70s? The way the Sparkletts guy casually brings lamb bones on his visits, it’s like an everyday thing. I have to go to the butcher’s if I want lamb. It’s not something you can generally pick up at the supermarket.)
