Blast from the Past: New! Improved! Classic Laundry Soap Commercials

I've done a lot of Blast from the Past installments, on many subjects. And though I'm pretty sure I've included soap commercials, and maybe even one or two of the selections below, I've never hit the all-time NEW! IMPROVED!!! category itself: laundry detergent. For whatever reason, in the 70s especially, Wall Street was intent on selling us improved soap for our clothes. Some of these are still with us today, and they just keep improving them!

Often, this column expounds at length on the clips featured, but I'm not sure it's necessary with this one. I mean, what can you say about soap? I'll just let the commercials (mostly) speak for themselves!

1. Calgon - "Ancient Chinese secret, huh?"
2. Oxydol Plus



3. Tide
4. Wisk - "Ring around the collar!"



5. Cheer - With a Star Trek theme, from 1969!
6. Bold - With Laugh-In's JoAnne Worley!



7. Gain
8. Era



And that's a wash! We're done for the weekend, happy Monday, everybody!

Blast from the Past: Soap Operas, Sitcom Style!

As I said before, a huge chunk of this weekend was spent watching Soap--the 70s sitcom spoof of soap operas--on my free Netflix trial. I mean a lot. Anyway, when it came time for me to write my weekly Blast from the Past feature, I couldn't quite shake off the Soapy residue. So, I thought, how about some clips from soap opera spoofs? Then, I thought "how many were there?" Let's see. . .




1. Soap - The one that got me started, and you can read that post here.
2. Grand - This was a very funny show that didn't last very long, unfortunately. It starred Pamela Reed, Bonnie Hunt and Michael McKean.
3. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman - My mom loved this one, but it was just a little over my head. . .or something.
4. Fresno - This one was a miniseries starring Carol Burnett, Teri Garr and Gregory Harrison, at the height of the Dynasty, Falcon Crest and Dallas phase.
5. The Powers That Be - Tragically short-lived, but hilarious. Starred Holland Taylor, John Forsythe, and David Hyde-Pierce.
6. As the Stomach Turns - All right, this one is a bit of a cheat. It was a recurring skit on The Carol Burnett Show, but is one of the classic soap opera spoofs.

That's it for this week. Happy Monday!

Netflix, the Cast of Soap and Old Age

This weekend, I cashed in an offer from the mail. Usually, I throw out junk mail, but I paused when I came across a free month of Netflix. After all, we just got a new wireless internet capable Blu-ray player for Christmas, and Netflix is one of the features it came ready with. Even if I forget to cancel, it's only $7.95 a month, which is pretty darned reasonable right there.

It's pretty nifty. You set up Netflix on your computer, load up movies on their web page, and poof! they appear in your Blue-ray player like magic! I'm sure in five or ten years, the process will be even slicker, and probably taken for granted. But for now, it's very cool. But right away, I discovered a built-in limitation. After just a few searches, I realized that much of Netflix's library is "DVD Only," which means you have to sign up for the $2-per-month extra service where they mail the DVD to you. $2 isn't much, but it's not nearly as convenient, and I can't imagine it is very cost effective. I predict that eventually, Netflix (or its successor) will be 100% online.

Anyway, the service is really pretty awesome, but has the potential to become just one more time waster. I got my feet wet watching episodes of the brilliant but cancelled Better Off Ted. And then somehow, I got trapped in an all-day marathon of the 70s sitcom, Soap. In two days, I think I'm up to episode 15. Of course, that's at 22 minutes a pop, so it's not all that bad. The show holds up remarkably well, retaining every bit of the humor it always had. It is of course not as risque as we remember (the Moral Majority would pass out from today's HBO and FX shows). And the 70s fashions and decor dates the show. Just think of it as That REAL 70s Show, and get past it. There's comedy gold here.

The show of course featured Billy Crystal as TVs first regular out gay character, though they weren't 100% accurate in dealing with it. Baby steps, right? It was still groundbreaking. The cast was absolutely stellar, particularly the older people in the cast (as opposed to the unevenly talented younger ones). Katherine Helmond as daffy Jessica Tate, Cathryn Damon as sensible Mary Campbell, Robert Mandan as philandering Chester Tate, Richard Mulligan as loopy Burt Campbell, and Robert Guillaume as sardonic butler Benson was a cast any show would envy. The other standouts for me were Ted Wass as sexy but dumb Danny and Jay Johnson as Chuck (and Bob the dummy) Campbell.

But the most stunning thing for me (besides the amount of time I spent watching it) was the age of the principal cast. This show originally aired when I was eleven years old. While I didn't completely get it then, I absolutely loved the show in its original run. And to me, Jessica, Mary, Benson, Burt and especially Chester weren't just older. They were old. Of course, my mother was 29 at the time, more in line with Jennifer Salt or Diana Canova (the Tate daughters). So the others were practically the age of my grandparents. 

Today, I am 44 years old, and The Other Half is 49. We both have birthdays within the next 5 months, so both of us will reach milestones of a sort. And both of us will bracket each Soap cast member in the photo above! Now, neither of us is anywhere near as youthful looking as we were when we met in 1998. But neither of us looks old enough to be any of those people! I'm going to be the same age as Chester Tate??? Sorry, Mr. Mandan. I know you're still out there, and got to have a career where you basically looked the same age for thirty years, so I'm really not knocking you. But wow. This life thing is really starting to speed up!

Blast from the Past: ABC TV Shows of the 70s!

Image from LocateTV

TV series in the 70s were much simpler than they are today. Dramas--except for soap operas--didn't require much attention, and typically had no b-story (or c-story), no subplots, no story-arcs, and almost no character development. Comedies were played as if they were on stage, were loud and harshly lit, and characters were cartoonish. If a show had a lovable ditz character in season one, they'd be an utter moron by season three.

There were exceptions of course, like M*A*S*H, All in the Family and the like, but for the most part the "idiot box" was aptly named in the 70s.  I loved it anyway. I got the idea from this post while up very early this morning (my sleep schedule is way outta whack), watching Three's Company on TVLand.  These were early episodes, before Chrissy was a drooling idiot. Anyway, ABC TV went from an also-ran network into a full-blown hit at exactly the same time I was becoming a pop culture junkie. The shows of that decade set me on the road to being a Trivial Pursuit savant, and have a central role in my childhood memories.  Here are some of my favorites of the era.








1. Happy Days - This show is likely the reason ABC had their big showing through the decade. It started the ball rolling, brought "The Fonz" into pop culture, and lasted 11 seasons.
2. Laverne & Shirley - Spun-off from Happy Days, this show was and remains a personal favorite. Unappreciated by critics, it was nevertheless a huge hit with viewers.
3. Soap - Considered "too dirty" for prime time (at least briefly), they actually aired it at night for a while in some markets. Marvelously loopy, and completely hilarious. Also, Billy Crystal played--I believe--the first scripted, regular gay character on television.
4. Mork & Mindy - Another spin-off of Happy Days, this one was of course about an alien from Ork crash-landing in Colorado, and moving in with a pretty career woman. It put Robin Williams on the map, and was a monster hit. . .until the network effectively killed it with scheduling and cast changes.
5. Barney Miller - I didn't appreciate this one much at the time. It was a little over my head at the time. But the theme song rocks.
6. Charlie's Angels - This show solidified ABC's dominance, and created "Jiggle TV." Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and later Cheryl Ladd were the definitive angels. None of the later TV or movie angels even came close.
7. Wonder Woman - Like the angels, Lynda Carter was and remains the definitive Wonder Woman. I frankly liked the updated, CBS version of the show better, but the ABC World War II version started it all.
8. The Love Boat - Probably the silliest of the list, this one was inexplicably a hit for many years. And it provided b-list actors a place to work, a role now filled by CSIs, Law & Orders and all the other procedurals out there.

Oddly enough, I couldn't find a Three's Company clip that was postable. Which is kind of strange. But there you go!

Happy Monday!

Blast from the Past: Bath Time in the 70s!

I was brainstorming, trying to figure out what to post for this week's Blast from the Past, and I thought, most people are going to see this on Monday morning, right? And what does everybody do first thing Monday morning? Hop in the tub, that's what! And if you don't, maybe you should watch #8.






1. Shower to Shower - A sprinkle a day helps keep odor away! Odor seems to have been a problem in the 70s.
2. Head & Shoulders - Poor Penny Marshall, rooming with Farrah Fawcett? Laverne & Farrah!
3. Gilette Trac II - I can't help but notice that shaving ads have gotten a lot sexier since the 70s. . .
4. Mr. Bubble - Do kids still take bubble baths?
5. Irish Spring - A manly scent. And was I complaining about a lack of the sexy? My, my, my. . .
6. Nair Baby Oil - Baby goils? Really?
7. Prell Shampoo - The husband in this ad seems potentially abusive.
8. Dial Soap - Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did? Oh, and the sexy makes a bit of a show in this one too. But they still liked to stick in a schlub or two!

Brain Droppings: From Oxydol to How to Clean a Skull

When I've heard recordings of conversations I've had (on video, or elsewhere), I'm startled by the way I sound. Not my voice, I'm used to that. What hits me in the face is the way I'll blurt out something that has nothing to do with the conversation at hand. Even more surprising, those around me don't say, "WTF, dude, where did THAT come from?"  The explanation for these out-of-nowhere exclamations is in the way my brain works.  I mentally hopscotch from one topic to the next fairly quickly internally, until I happen upon something that I think others might want to hear, and we go from talking about tennis shoes to me remarking on the Blizzard of '78.

It happened on a different plane this weekend.  I was at Big Lots with The Other Half, and saw that they had Oxydol on sale. I picked the bottle up because a) we needed laundry detergent, b) It had a logo that looked new, and c) my friend and contributor Stupid Monkey Planet has been warning me about using products with animal-testing corporations behind them.  I was looking at the label, sure that this was a product of one of the offending companies.  Instead, I saw that it was made by "CR Products," a company I've never heard of.

So, remembering this, I looked them up.  It turns out that Procter & Gamble started making Oxydol in 1927, but sold the brand to Redox in 2000.  Redox merged with another company called ChemPro, and became CR Products. Which is only mildy interesting, I'll admit.  But as I do, I fell into a Wiki-hole again, and clicked through to see what else CR makes, and found BIZ detergent, also a former P&G product.  And BIZ, it turns out, is an especially good product for cleaning skulls.  I'll bet you didn't know that.

[Excerpt]

How to Clean a Skull

Every year thousands of people hunt and trap in Alaska. One of the small treasurers discarded by many of these outdoor people is the skull of the hunted or trapped animal. A cleaned skull is a source of curiosity and wonder - a mirror of an animal's mode of life - providing insights into the animal's diet, strength of bite and its specially developed senses. In addition to enjoying the natural wonder of skulls, a skull collection can be a great addition to a classroom in a variety of courses, including art, science and social studies. Cleaning a skull is an easy process and can be no more unpleasant than pulling meat off a cooked soup bone. Here is how to clean a skull for display or study. . .

Read more if you have a pressing need to clean a skull, at: Wildlife Conservation

Classic Commercials #6 - Soapy Goodness

Yes, I know, another batch of commercials. These are more fun than writing about politics, and personal issues. They also come from deep within my memory banks, and probably yours too.

I'm still trying to avoid the Emmy news while the show is on. Finally saw the Sally Field moment where she got bleeped, and they went to the silent disco-ball shot while she expressed some anti-war sentiment. Anyway, on with the commercials!

#1 - Irish Spring - And I like it too!
#2 - Palmolive - Madge knows it all.
#3 - Wisk - Those filthy rings! Oh, and this video has awesome 70s ABC-TV ads too!
#4 - Calgon - Ancient Chinese secret, huh?

Guilty Pleasures: Soap

As you've seen in previous posts, I was a kid of the 70s, addicted to ABC, in their heyday. One of the best of the era (and it still holds up) was Soap. I didn't get all the jokes back then, which only makes it better now. Check out this clip of the first appearance of "Chuck" and "Bob," Bert's son and his son's puppet. Inspired silliness. Enjoy.



And because I can't stop with just one, here's a clip of Jessica's possessed grandson.