Can anyone tell me what decade this is from?

Updated on October 9, 2009 By Ken Begg 16 Comments

I just can’t quite put my finger on it.

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  • as near as I can tell it is a colorized version of an early 1930s TV ad.

  • roger h

    No more jokes about BHO’s “mom jeans” he is wearing “Action Jeans”

  • fish eye no miko

    Why is Jean Kasem taunting Colin Hay like that?

  • It’s a trick question. Obviously NO ONE would ever make an advertisement as sterotypical and opaque as this one. It’s either a SNL parody of an ad, or else Ken himself whipped it together out of whole cloth.

  • Brad

    I was at my 20-year high school reunion a few months back, and I laughed at the pics of the girls with the big hair back then.

    If I saw the big hair and this commercial back to back, I think my head would’ve exploded.

  • sandra

    I think Big Hair like that is an 80s thing.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Reminds me a lot of the SCTV “Poochari” dog food commercial.

  • Well, that was a direct parody of this commercial. Poochari can also be found on You Tube, btw.

  • Toreen

    Is it even from this country?

  • sandra

    I remember the Poochari commercial. It was always fun when SCTV suckered you into thinking you were looking at a real ad, like that one where ‘Donnie and Marie’ were singing about crab medecine: “It kills you nits and your lice / and makes you feel really nice/ You better go uh, whatever. To get that itch from your skin, and keep on living in sin…” They nearly got me that time.

  • BeckoningChasm

    I was ignorant, when “Poochari” first ran on SCTV, of where its origins might lie, though I figured it had to be a parody of “something.” I just knew it was funny, without any context. Thank you, Ken, for supplying that context many moons later.

    For my money, Eugene Levy is still funnier and, well, more dynamic. And I’d buy that dog food before I’d buy those jeans.

  • For some inexplicable reason, I can’t get the phrase “Uh oh, Sergio” out of my head now… Sergio Valente, Sergio Valente… Jeans! Uh oh, Sergio… It just won’t stop now. Damn your Bonjour ad!

  • Flakey

    Is it even from this country?

    Toreen

    Well since its a right hand drive car, and the voice over has a Southern English accent. I would say it is from over here, in Britain

  • Maybe, but it definitely played here…and in Canada too, since they parodied it on SCTV.

  • ProfessorKettlewell

    “Well since its a right hand drive car, and the voice over has a Southern English accent. I would say it is from over here, in Britain”

    Dunno. It’s a Lotus Esprit, innit? I don’t think there was ever a LHD / export model. Although that dockyard looks disused and rundown enough to be Newcastle in the early-eighties. It’s a one-camera, 16mm shoot with shoddy lock-offs and a magnificent widow’s peak on the actor, which WAS typical of UK production-values….

  • Wayne

    I remember this vividly (cause it made no sense). It was a commercial that played on American TV back in the late 1970s.