What a great commercial that was. Very effective. I sent a note to my brother this morning about a local commercial that ran in Southern California forty years ago and he replied that it had been running through his head just last week. I don't watch tv commercials any longer but then again, I remember all of them from 40 years ago and they come to mind all the time anyway so I guess I don't need to see new ones.
That Tab commercial looks like something that would've gotten someone in Don Draper's office fired. 1958 Velveeta "Cheese." I'm skipping U because I can't think of any product starting with "U" outside U-Haul, and "vintage U-haul" is 1980s. That's not vintage. I could by beer during almost all of that decade.
Wham-O - Slip N Slide and the Water Wiggle! I never really wanted one....it didn't look like there was enough padding to be jumping on the ground like.
The good old days when nobody really cared enough to card you... I got grandfathered in when MADD's activism got the age raised to 21. If only they were as adamant about making sure the draft took only those humans who had adult privileges in every other walk of life...
I owned the Gold Award, the Butterfly and the original one, but I can't recall its name. I still have that Butterfly, but I need to go to my mom's and look thru a bunch of boxes. Duncans were all the rage when I was in third grade; I think it was their second time as a fad. It was kind of funny that it wasn't really about yo-yos in general or what tricks you could do, but about owning Duncans. They weren't expensive as yo-yos went, and certainly not as toys went, so not a status thing, but that's what we all had. I don't remember anyone having a yo-yo that wasn't a Duncan. They were the only company with a commercial, and AFAIK there wasn't a "better" brand commercially available On the negative side... Clackers were also a thing that year. I had some of those, too, but, like a nunchaku (became popular in middle school for a brief few months among my pals), you either worked at it enough to get decent or you put it down before you got hurt. It should have been a crime to sell those things, but it wasn't...
I very much remember this commercial. I guess that's effective, even tho I was never in the market for a copier...
Like Auria, I remember multiple yo-yo fads between first and sixth grade. And I can confirm: Duncan was pretty much the only acceptable yo-yp to be had. I got through the last one with my butterfly yo-yo that I had purchased during a previous one. Forty years later, my brother gave it to his daughter (with a new string) for one of the most recent yo-yo fads (12 years ago or so).
That line about learning arithmetic reminds me of my early days with computers. I was lucky that my father worked in a field that forced him to keep up with the basics of computer tech so we had an Atari computer at our house. One night my Pa was so proud of a math learning program he created I was forced to sit and answer basic addition and subtraction problems for two hours so he could make sure the program worked. It was nothing big and loud like in the Apple ad shows. Rather just lines of math problems laid out on a black screen like I was enter the proper code to get the next line to show up. He was proud of the behind the scene coding he learned but all I thought while sitting there answering the questions was, "Why am I being forced to do math when I am not at elementary school or doing homework?"
One of the most aggressive commercials ever, it's Robert Conrad daring you to call Eveready Batteries 'regular.' From 1978.