I’ve spent a considerable chunk of my Sunday morning perusing the Commercial Download Center at X-Entertainment, and man it is hitting my nostalgia bone hard. And that’s actually really weird, because I would have been 3 years old at most when any of these commercial actually aired. I guess maybe it’s the fact that they really don’t make advertisements like they used to. Where have all the silly cartoon mascots and stupid jingles gone? Not to mention the terrible acting and special effects. Commercials just don’t catch my interest the way they used to; I watched the McDonald’s commercial and immediately craved McDonald’s. Nowadays I’m pretty sure McDonald’s ads aren’t even allowed to show food (though technically, in this specific commercial all the foodstuffs are puppets).
The other thing that struck me is just how retarded some of these marketing campaigns are. “Underoos are neat to wear!”? Really? “Neat” is the best word you could come up with the describe your product? Even “fun” would have been less stupid. Don’t even get me started on the Pringles ad.
Why didn’t they bring back the “You can smile, America, with Chuck E Cheese!” commercial after 9/11? Totally would have revived the franchise. (Still too soon?)
The fact of the matter here it that in retrospect, I love this cheesiness. It’s great, and gives me the warm fuzzies all over. I truly miss the days when Ronald hung out with McNugget puppets instead of “healthy lifestyle” kids. And I miss cereal box giveaways sooooooooo much. If I’m ever in charge of a cereal, there’s damn well gonna be toys in those boxes. Fuck anyone who tries to stop me.
I also miss the days when I would spend, well, entire days reading X-E. Matt’s completely done away with the front page (beat him to that years ago) and any sort of complete articles now, and made it so that the blog is the main event. Not that I don’t like the blog, it’s still totally X-E, but I like to dig up the old articles once in a while and reminisce about simpler times. Now there are no article links anywhere and I don’t remember the naming scheme he used for the files so I can’t find any! Augh! I’m sure I have links to many of them in my own backlog, but damned if I’ll be searching there. It’s almost nine years worth of nonsense now!