Dionne Warwick recorded decades worth of hit songs. Then one day in the 1990s she signed on to become the spokesperson for a 1-900 service called ‘the Psychic Friends Network’. Celebrities have, of course, been using their names to promote products and services for many years, but occasionally they make dubious choices who to hitch their wagon to and their reputation suffers as a result.
Are there any other examples of celebrities that have signaled ‘hey folks, I’ve officially hit the skids and now find myself slumming on late night infomercials or having my name associated with other dubious endeavors’
In other words, who are the Troy McClures of today?
More seriously, I think I remember Wilford Brimley more for his pronunciation of “diabetes” and his Quaker Oats work than any of his acting, but that may be just due to my age.
It would be fair to say Jared Fogle was nobody before Subway decided to use him in their commercials. It was only afterwards that we learned about all the child pornography stuff.
Katherine Heigl pitching Poise bladder leakage products. I mean, don’t get me wrong–for those who have that problem, I’m sure it’s a necessary and very welcome product. But hearing her say stuff like, it prevents the “coughing fits panty blitz”, I just feel embarrased for her.
On a related tangent - Mike Lindell & Elon Mush (<-- good typo, I’m leaving it!) have both caused financial hits to companies they were CEOs of because of their political positions.
In Argentina Erik Estrada is known more for his late night commercials about weight-loss drugs than for CHIPS I fear.
My generation still dimly remember Poncharello, but mostly he’s the man with the hilarious (to us) accent that went down 20 pounds (whatever a “pound” is, we use kilos) with reduce-fat-fast.
You can say “ió bajé 20 libras de peso con reduce-fat-fast” to anybody around my age and get a recognition smile.
I’ll defend him a little. He looked old enough to be hawking said and it was far from shady. In addition, this guy never earned big money as an actor until sometime in the 80s. Even then, he was never an A-lister.
He was a well known character actor and the Quaker commercials I don’t think caused his reputation much harm if any.
How about Orson Welles? About 45 years ago, he was doing commercials for Paul Masson wines. To go from directing one of the highest-rated movies of all time to shilling low-end wines is quite a drop in one’s career.
I don’t know it appearing in commercials has sullied his reputation, but I’m getting awfully tired of seeing John Hamm popping up in commercial after commercial for this, that and the other thing. There gets to be a saturation point, ya know?
Alex Trebek made good money as Jeopardy host. Then he decided he needed more and decided to do Colonial Penn insurance commercials. (Colonial Penn offers guaranteed acceptance, “no medical exam” policies, that are not really very good insurance products)
