Commercials That Take Me Right Back

It's Saturday, so it's time for a nostalgic memberberries article. Some people say that scent evokes the strongest memories. For me, the commercials of my youth have an uncanny way of bringing me right back to my childhood. I'm going to list some of them here. Be warned that because my childhood peaked in the materialistic 80's, there's going to be a heavy Christmas theme. In my younger days, December 26th might as well have been named "What did you get?" Day. We'll get the most obvious one out of the way first.



As soon as that bass line kicked in, my pulse would quicken and my eyes would dilate. Even thought I started collecting the toys as soon as the line launched, I don't really remember the early commercials. While I have crystal clear memory of the excitement over the 20-back figures, I only have the vaguest memory of the commercials. The Empire Strikes Back commercials are the ones I remember best, specifically the 4-LOM commercial because I was blown away seeing all 47 figures at once. I would have embedded that, but the quality isn't that great, so you get the Imperial Attack Base instead. I can remember being almost angry if a commercial aired and I already had all the figures. I WANTED TO SEE NEW STUFF, DANG IT!



Remember gift certificates? Except for some mom and pops, they're largely extinct now in favor of gift cards. I miss them. Retailers treated them like cash, so if your purchase was less than certificate amount, you got change. None of this balance nonsense with gift cards that you have to look up on a website, and that you invariably never use once it gets small enough. I would get a $5 book of McDonald's gift certificates from one of my relatives every year. I remember being excited to get them, but it was really a rip off. I never paid for my own McDonald's as a kid. It was a present for my parents. I would have been better off with a crisp fiver to slip into the old Levis velcro wallet.



I know for a lot of you reading this, your first foray into home video games was the NES. I'm young enough to still be nostalgic about the NES, but old enough to have rocked the one-button Atari 2600 joystick. I also had the 5200 before making the jump to 8-bit. I still think the Sega Genesis is my favorite overall iteration. Joe Montana's Football had Pat Summerall doing play by play by gosh! Sure it was a robotic digitized voice, but that just so happened to be Summerall's actual speaking voice. But I'm getting off track again. I've mentioned before that my family almost never shopped at Toys R Us because there were three or four toy stores in closer proximity, but those Christmas Toys R Us Atari commercials made me feel like they were some sort of video game Mecca.



If you were born last century, is there any greater marker of time than smokers? They went from being ubiquitous to virtually non-existent overnight. The only place you'll find one now is that one unavoidable guy directly outside every Walmart entrance. He must be a Walmart employee. The Ronco commercials was another thing that heralded the coming holiday season. I can actually remember the smokeless ashtray being given to one of my uncles one year. Those commercials also made me realize that I desperately needed an organizer for my record albums. And some record albums to organize.

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