Sunny Delight is precisely what I came in here to mention. I just hate it when a company tries to force trendiness into their product and onto us!
And what can Brown do for me? It can damn well come up with another idea for an ad campaign, that’s what. It just sounds so…oogy.
I must share this little anecdote about those annoying Vonage ads: my 11 year old daughter hates them with a passion. The other night, one came on and as usual, I muted it (I hate it, too!). DD started saying how much she hated it, and I was listening with half an ear, when suddenly she gave an outraged cry and my hubby was laughing his ass off. Seems that my six year old son had gone to sit beside her, and very softly had begun singing, “Woo-hoo, woo-hoo-hoo!” over and over. He did it with perfect timing and subtlety–ya gotta love it!
There’s a Hay Fever medicine here called Zyrtec that ran an ad campaign very recently, which tried to introduce"… like a Zyrtec" as a way of expressing how quickly something happened or worked- the ad had two twentysomething women sitting in a cafe, with one of them saying that she bought up the marriage thing with her boyfriend and he left “like a Zyrtec”, complete with that bitchy finger clicking thing you see on Jerry Springer (I believe it was called “Bitch, my man ain’t yo baby’s daddy!” in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back).
Pissed me off no end, it did, and ensured that if I ever needed an allergy medicine, I’d be getting Telfast or something that didn’t try and make itself “cool”.
Pogs were another thing that I recall a chip company- Smiths, maybe?- trying to introduce a few years ago. Sure, they may have been big in California or wherever the hell they were from, but their attempts to make the “cool” to kids… “Pogs! Caps! The Game!” ensured that their efforts would be met with derision by all and sundry…
A local dairy still sells (at least until 2003 – I haven’t looked recently) their milk in glass bottles. Until the late-'90s they used traditional foil caps with a cardboard insert – a ‘pog’, if you will.
“There’s a brand-new craze
That’s a-goin’ around.
Squeeze a Jif!”
This was a failed circa 1977 British ad campaign for a sweet liquid goo that came in a squeezable fruit-shaped plastic dispenser - presumably by the manufacturers of real lemon juice and so on. Alas the ‘candy’ didn’t take off, but the uncool slogan did - accompanied by one’s schoolmate chasing one while singing the jingle, before grabbing one’s testes and crushing them on the “squeeze a Jif” line.
I once heard a very overworked UPS guy at the local distribution center tell a customer, “Look. I can’t do anything right now. But Monday morning you call *this * number and you tell **THEM ** what Brown can do for you.” I wish I could convey his tone: his withering contempt in that one sentence spoke volumes about every aspect of UPS.
I agree about WaMu, but I have to say I enjoyed the commercial about a man who so loves the bank that his wife thinks he’s having an affair: <cue anguished, heartbroken voice> “Her name is Wamula?”
Probably not, but it does have that nice little ding sound when you hit stuff with it. You want something more than that soft wooden sound and that cushy resistance like when you hit a pillow. That sharp aluminum ding is just the ticket.
Does anybody remember The Freddie? A silly dance invented by Freddie and the Whoevers back in the era of Twist spinoffs. This one had you stand still and then on one foot and spread your arms out like you were doing semaphore, then switch feet and do the same gesture. Absolutely weird looking.
Other dances from that era might be just as bizarre, but the Freddie was a loser.
Not just Sailor Moon, anime in general. Remember back when video games were the province of nerds and losers? Then they blew up and became something the cool kids did? Anime was supposedly the next nerd phenomenon from Japan that was going to enter the American mainstream in a big way. Lots of companies jumped on the bandwagon and made fools of themselves trying to make anime play to the cool kids. Now the fad has come and gone and anime is back to a niche for nerds.
I suspect the UPS “Brown” thing comes from CB jargon. For years truckers have referred to UPS drivers (usually over their CB radios) as “Buster Brown”. It’s a reference to the old radio and TV ads for Buster Brown shoes and probably inspired by the summer uniform w/ short pants.
