Day 15: Commercials, Gameboy Pocket, 1-800-Collect
If you went solely off of commercials from 1996 you would think all Americans cared about was gum, candy bars, minivans, and long distance telephone calls. In today’s write up I’ll be goofing on a few televised ads. To be fair, commercials of 1996 aren’t unique to the criticisms or mockery I’m dishing out but they are in line for it.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a Trident, Juicy Fruit, Extra, or Big Red commercial. In 1996, if you had a mouth without gum in it then what on earth were you doing with that toothy maw of yours? Just using it to hold your tongue in place? Sounds like a waste of cheek tissue to me! You should be moving your jaw more and keeping your mouth wind smelling fresher!
Here’s a scenario that perhaps you haven’t considered before. You and a bunch of your outdoor friends want to load up the Jeep Wrangler with your mountain bikes and head into the scraggy dessert for a day of adventure. Bike helmets? Check. Sun goggles? Check. Biking shoes? Double check. Something so juicy and fruity that it will actually add air into the tires of your bike and help you scale sandy ravines at such a neck breaking pace that even Lance Armstrong’s rogue testicle couldn’t fathom? Check as fuck.
Maybe I just don’t watch television with commercials anymore, but I almost forgot candy bars existed. Well, not entirely. Snickers has the “you’re not you when you’re hungry” bit and M&M’s, not technically candy BARS, but candy nonetheless, have their thing with the talking candies. I just don’t see them as frequently now as they appear to have been back in 1996. Maybe those ad spots are reserved for children’s shows or sports events, but in 1996 almost every other commercial showed caramel being slowly poured over “nooget”, peanuts, or chocolate.
“Me and Cinderella
We put it all together
We can drive it home
With one headlight”
The minivan was popularized in the late 80’s and perhaps peaked near this era of the 90’s given that the SUV renaissance was right around the corner. I did no research for that sentence so it could all be false, but it seems right? Doesn’t it? There were so many commercials for these things. The Windstar, the Aerostar, the Astro, the Town & Country, the Voyager, the Caravan, and on and on. Many of the commercials were full of the same thing: white children. White women putting their white kids in vans, all the time. There was one I thought was going to buck the norm, 25 seconds in to a 30 second ad and I had only seen a white woman with groceries but right before it faded out I saw a little white leg dangling in the back seat. SO CLOSE. One commercial did stick out to me and featured no kids or people at all but instead referred to a minivan as a tree house for adults. The whole marketing push of the minivan industry was so you could load the damn thing with kids. It’s not an adult fantasy to own a minivan! You get one because you’ll rarely be alone in it. In fact, “Alone In A Minivan” is the saddest country music hit to never be written.
Some other favorites include the talking Gameboys. Yes, 1996 was the year the original green hued Gameboy finally evolved but not into the Gameboy Color. Not yet. In 1996 the Gameboy could finally fit in your pocket! Funny enough, in all my years of collecting, owning, and gaming, I have never owned or even held a Gameboy Pocket. How has this commercial never been memed? A YouTuber with two friends could have made this entire ad in an afternoon.
In 2021 I am completely Marvel’d out. I was Marvel’d out in 2016. But in 1996, as a kid who wasn’t into comics but still recognized these characters as “cool” things to like, I was lured by any and everything they were associated with. I don’t remember this specific Happy Meal campaign, and I was probably “too old” to get a Happy Meal then or at least pretended to be, but I’m sure deep down 1996 Travis wanted to score a Spider-man.
If the ubiquity of cell phones in the early 2000’s did little else aside from drop important calls every ten minutes, it surely put an end to freaking fix rate long distance commercials. I recall 1-800-COLLECT being the first one that pervaded ad space but in the middle of 1996 others would arrive. 10-10-321, 10-10-220, 10-10-987, and on and on. The weird part is that all of those numbers were owned by the same company: MCI. They went out of business in 2002 and freed up hours of ad space on television previously eaten up by the constant barrage long distance promises. You think $0.30/ minute is bad? The service launched in 1993 at $29.99 for the first five minutes.
What are some commercials you remember most from 1996?
