Classic Commercials

Rating:
Summary: What a let-down!
Review: Almost 4 hours of classic commericials from the 50s, 60s & 70s... sounds like a hoot down nostalgia lane, right? Wrong. The commercials are categorized in what sometimes seem like arbitrary categories... and you can only navigate from category to category. There is no listing of what commercials are in each category and you can't jump to specific commercials, but must take note (via trial and error - 2 discs and nearly 4 hours of trial and error) of which category your favorite commercial is in, then jump to that category and painfully fast-forward until you get to it.

In addition, absolutely no effort has been made to bring the quality of the commercials back to their original broadcast quality or to even add closed captioning for the hearing impaired or even for those who want to know the exact lyrics to a catchy tune.

This is one half-baked effort.

Rating:
Summary: Vivid window on another state of mind
Review: As other reviewers have stated, the picture quality here is indeed horrible. I am pretty generous with Lo-fi visual resources, and couldn't imagine it being as bad as they said. But they are correct, without exaggeration. Most of the visuals here are murky, artifact-filled, distorted in color, intermittently ghosty, contrasty and in and out of focus (though mostly out). The quality doesn't really stand up even at the postage stamp-sized viewing window of the typical internet Quicktime trailer. It's that awful. You are going to have to work with this set, and want to like it a lot.

Which I did. It's a testimony to the strength of the basic content that these problems don't come close to destroying the smile-inducing curiosity and nostalgia inherent in the material. If you want it to be 1962 again, or if you are a student of advertising, popular culture or the history of television-- and you can overlook abysmal picture quality-- these disks deliver. There is a longer Speedy Alka Seltzer spot than I have ever seen, some very cool minimal Tom Terrific- or UPA-style animation. Great advertising characters abound (included is that venerable icon of political incorrectness, the Frito Bandito, voiced by the great Mel Blanc). And if you've read reprints of MAD magazines first ten years, you will be able to view, possibly for the first time, some of the targets of their most memorable advertising satire (the Bandaid boiling egg test), as well as some of those bizarre cryptic references in Bill Elder and Harvey Kurtzman's zany, teeming panels ("...the foaming cleanser, BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM BOMMM..."; "How're you fixed for blades, man?"). Arthur Godfrey appears here as the style of soft sell pitchman probably known to recent generations only through Paul Harvey. (The goal was to seem to capture the pitchman, taking a break from his show, in a casual conversational mode about a product he actually used.)

Even with the image quality issues, I recommend this set. It's amusing, innocent fun, occasionally borderline embarrassing, and often rather surreal. In the end, it's revelatory. --You may find yourself wondering, were we ever really this unself-conscious, this unironic, this innocent? I know how I'd answer those questions. But take a look and decide for yourself.

PS: The single content quibble I have with the collection, by the way (which may be major to you) is that there are surprisingly few cereal commercials here. When I think of childhood, I probably think of those entertaining animated cereal commercials, even ahead of toy commercials.

Rating:
Summary: Hilarious for all the wrong reasons.
Review: Did you ever a have a VHS tape that you used to tape things over and over and over and over on - a virtual patchwork of football hilites or music videos from the early days of cable? Or you taped a tv show while watching it and tried to edit out all the commercials? You know the tape....after one scene ends you hit the pause button just a second too late and catch the first few frames of the next scene (a couple dozen times all throughout the tape). Take that tape, don't edit or remaster it, and transfer it to DVD, and this is the production quality of this set.

Buddy, I'm not kidding. This thing is so bad that there are some commercials you can't even make out what the product is because the brightness level is way too high and/or the audio is so garbled. And I'm not kidding when I say that there are commercials that end, then you see a second or two of some other program, then the screen goes black and a new commercial begins. Incredible. Besides that, there is no documentation that lists all of the commercials included. Most of the commercials are in b&w from the very early days of television though I doubt even back then the picture quality was as bad as it is on some of these spots.

I honestly could not help but laugh when I watched this DVD - just marveling at how half-assed it was put together. It's just unbelievable that a company would release something this unprofessional and that a retailer like Best Buy would carry it.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Granted, I've only gone through 10 or 20 commercials in this collection that claims to contain over 300, but I doubt I go much further than I already have. Apparently someone owns the rights to any real good commercials of the 50s, 60s and 70s. I've watched Bing Crosby do a Ducks Unlimited piece, John Wayne to a Cancer Society segment and Fibur Mcgee of radio fame (so he tells us) do a plug for the National Association of Retired Persons. There are a lot of great commercials out there, I've yet to see one make this collection.

Rating:
Summary: Not all that bad
Review: Granted, one should not expect pristine prints of commercials that were not intended for posterity some 30-50 years after they were filmed. However, midway through an intriguing set that includes the Flintstones Winston Commericials, Lucy and Desi's Animated Philip Morris piece, Bugs and Daffy for tang (Daffy actually gets the best of Bugs in this one), and a great Andy and Barney segment for Grape nuts, the picture flickers greatly.

That aside, it's not bad. Baby boomers and Gen Xers will get warm and fuzzy over Josephine the Plumber, "It's The real Thing," "Get the Barefoot Feeling with Mountain Dew," the politically incorrect "Frito Bandito," etc. However, The Malboro Man, The Esso Tiger, "I Can't Belive I Ate the Whole Thing" and a few other major spots are missing. But this is good as pop-culture history for most and a walk down memory lane for others.

Rating:
Summary: Don't buy it...awful....
Review: I agree with the other reviewer...this is terrible...extremely poor picture quality, poor audio, poor product. Don't waste your money. I watched a minute or two, and couldn't watch anymore as I was just so disappointed with what a poor product this is....

Rating:
Summary: Quality Complaints ARE Justified
Review: I bought this double DVD set at a local bargain store for only 6 dollars, so I can't complain about the price. But I do think the complaints of other reviewers about the picture and sound quality of this set ARE justified, even if the commercials here are 40-50 years old. They do exist and, in many cases, in almost perfect form. I know--I've seen them.

Way back in the early VHS days, I bought a tape collection of classic commercials, and this DVD set (at least most of it) was taken DIRECTLY from that source. The commercials are the same, in the same order. The quality of that tape was bad 15-20 years ago, and whoever put together this set probably had that tape in their garage or attick for the last 15-20 years, because the quality shows 15-20 years worth of deterioration over the already poor original tape.

On the other hand, the DVD set IS probably worth getting because the price is so cheap and you get so much material. The cheap-o company that put the set out did a pretty good job with the packaging, which is pretty well done, and the menu set up.

It is also worth getting for the Johnny Smoke commercial (as another reviewer said). I remember this commercial from my early childhood, probably when I was 7 or 8 years old. It was such a favorite amongst my "set" that we used to tune into the early 70s syndicated version of "To Tell The Truth" on channel 5 here in New York at night just to see it (where it was shown as a PSA very frequently), and we had sort of a Johnny Smoke fan club. Talk about unintended consequences! We used to go around snitching our parents cigarettes, fitting them out with paper cowboy hats and making our own "Johnny Smokes" out of them. I never did start smoking myself, but I'm sure a few of my old pals did! Johnny Smoke made cigarettes seem so cool!

Also, about the famous botched Westinghouse ad, which exists here (unfortunately) in a VERY poor quality print: it was done live on TV. The refrigerator door was supposed to be electronically activated, so that your housewife could nudge the handle with her elbow (while carrying a heavy pot or bowl) and the door was supposed to open automatically, by itself, so your housewife didn't have to put the bowl or pot down to yank it open. It happened that the plug of the refrigerator had accidently been knocked out of the wall that night by a grip before the commercial went on live, and when the girl (June Graham, pinch hitting for a luckily absent Betty Furness) went to open the door automatically--Voila!, it didn't open! You can imagine her embarrassment.

It happens that this was one of the few nights that our Betty was doing something else, and couldn't make her Westinghouse gig, and poor June was left holding the bag. One can imagine how the paint on the walls would have peeled had the very efficient Betty Furness been the victim of this goof! The whole episode was related in Jeff Kisseloff's excellent history of early television "The Box", so it must have been a famous incident at the time. It's hilarious to watch as they move the camera in on Miss Graham in an EXTREMELY tight close up as someone scrambles, unseen, to stick the plug back in. And, yes, by the end of the commercial--Voila!, it does work. Too bad the artifact of it on this disc is so poorly preserved.

I would say, for the time being, and at the low price, by all means buy this set if you're interested in the history of television advertisement. But thse things DO exist in better copies (I know because I have a big collection of them on about a dozen VHS tapes), and hopefully the better quality will become available as time goes by.

Also, if one watches the Game Show Network in the very early morning when they show their old Black & White shows (I've Got a Secret, Password, What's My Line, etc.), when they play the current commercials, they run them over the old ones that are still embedded in the films of the old shows. Once in a while they goof, and a second or two of the old commercial slips through, and they are in PERFECT condition. Maybe we fans of old time commercials can prevail upon GSN to issue a couple of DVDs of commercial culled from these programs, because they would be mint copies of many of the commercials we struggle to see on this set.

Rating:
Summary: Really, really bad
Review: I concur with the other reviewer. The sound and picture quality is patheticly bad. The static and hiss is so bad, I can barely make out the dialog in some of these commercials. I have no difficulty believing that this DVD is copied from EP videotapes.

The product description fails to mention that these are also all very, very old commercials (from the 1950's). What makes them "classic," other than the fact that they're very old, is beyond me.

Rating:
Summary: Lighten up!...It wasn't that bad
Review: I got this box set a few days back, and yes, the quality isn't very good, and living in Australia I've only heard of about half of the products shown. But even so, it's fun to watch and may I say interesting too. They could have done better,did we really need to see 6 or 7 Crest commercials in a row, and some (most) of the editing was very rough, but still, it was cheap and cheerful and I'm glad I bought it.

Rating:
Summary: Poor Quality doesn't Take Away from the Fun
Review: I paid 7 bucks for my set, so I wasn't out a whole lot. The audio/visual quality was poor, but my son and I still enjoyed watching these classic commercials, one after the other. No annoying commentary sandwiched in between, either. These commercials are from a simpler time, you might even find yourself getting a bit misty-eyed at times. Go into this purchase knowing that this is not a 4-star release and enjoy this two-disc set for what it is.