So if you’ve been watching enough of the Paris Olympics, you’ve seen enough footage of Parisian life and culture and you’ve inevitably heard the “Can-Can.” I think it was used in the opening ceremonies, in fact. And we’re all familiar with it, right? We can even picture the dancers from a place like the Moulin Rouge doing their high kicks to the song. Well, unless you’re like me and every time you hear the tune, you hear: “Now, Shop Rite does the can can selling lots of brands of everything in … cans cans.”
Yes, I realize that I have a problem. But really, when you think of it, we all have commercials that get stuck in our heands, and I even talked about some of my most memorable ones back on episode 97 of the podcast. And on that episode, with the exception of Crazy Eddie and a Roy Rogers commercial, most of the commercials I talked about in that episode were for national brands. When it comes to this Shop Rite commercial, people in maybe five states in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic part of the country are going to recognize that jingle, just like we also recognize character actor James Karen as “The PathMark guy”:
Again, who gets that except for people in the NY-NJ-CT Tri-State area?
Local and regional commercials are this weird thing that provide us with part of our identity and culture in a way that I don’t think we realize, especially when they are silly or have a song associated with them. See them enough times when you’re a kid and they somehow become embedded in your brain right next to the opening from “You Give Love a Bad Name” and various Beastie Boys lyrics you probably shouldn’t know. I can’t remember the number of times that myself or someone I knew would make a reference to the “Beautiful Mt. Airy Lodge” commercials that ran during afternoon cartoons or how “Just Round the Corner” became a running joke in my house when I was a kid. And think about it: have you ever had a conversation with someone who grew up near you and one of you sings “800-588-2300 Empiiiiire … today” or mentions a commercial for insurance that had its own version of the Fly Girls?
Right now, anyone in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area is having flashbacks because they probably saw the Gebco Girls a thousand times whenever grandma was watching her stories or they were sick at home and The Price is Right was on. And I’m not going to knock the dancers, but I have to say that … it’s car insurance? But hey, it’s memorable and there are tons of insurance companies and local car dealerships who are going to try any sort of crazy idea to get you to purchase something.
Hearing the “Can-Can” and remembering the Shop-Rite commercial made me think of the random local commercials that I used to see on TV and have stuck with me for what are now decades, and I thought I’d highlight five … or at least five that I haven’t already covered. Now, for all I know, they actually aired outside of the Tri-State Area, but to me they always seemed so specific.
Apex Technical School
It’s the most straightforward commercial, right? Well, there were a few places like this in my area, some of which were national schools like DeVry or ITT Tech, but Apex Tech was hyper local and this guy was kind of a TV icon because this commercial always ran. And we all remembered it because of the ending: “Now I can’t call you. Get up and call us now.” I remember that when I was a senior in high school, my fellow honors students and I–in typical arrogant asshole honors students fashion–would joke that we were just going to get up and call Apex Tech if we got rejected from colleges, kind of in the same way that we’d joke about those International Correspondence Schools courses that Sally Struthers advertised, although this school seemed way more legitimate than that. In fact, Apex Tech is still open in Queens and Long Island and advertises itself as a solid trade school.
Dr. Zizmor
Petland Discounts.
Now those commercials didn’t have a jingle and had more of a catch phrase, making it the exception to the rule as far as these ads were concerned. This one had a song that … well, I think that my sister and I were the only ones to really latch onto it. We’d literally randomly sing “Petland discounts … at Petland we caaaare!”, which is what happens when your house does not have cable and you pretty much have no life.
Anyway, when it comes to Long Island, this commercial has everything: the catchphrase, the song, and the moustacioed guy in the suit. Really, how many guys with moustaches and suits were there on my television in the Eighties and Nineties selling their wares? Fur coats, furniture, and yes, pet supplies–if it didn’t have a guy with a moustache wearing a suit, Linda from Ronkonkoma wasn’t buying it.
The Milford Plaza.
Several months ago, my sister sent this to me on Instagram and I replied, “I don’t even need to turn on the sound.”
Not only did this commercial run all the time, but I am pretty sure that it ran more or less completely unchanged all the way into the 1990s (it was shot in 1982), but you’d be sitting at home on a Tuesday watching The Disney Afternoon or a California Dreams rerun and this same ad–untarnished by cool Nineties updates–would run, telling you all about “The LullaBUY of Broadway.” And it seeped into our collective subconscious to the point where I think that we could use it as some sort of secret code identifier for people from the area and that generation, especially since the Milford Plaza doesn’t exist as a hotel anymore–in the 2010s, it became the Row NYC hotel and I’m not sure if it’s still even open.
Carvel
There are I don’t know how many commercials for Carvel where Tom Carvel is pitching the ice cream or there’s a focus on Fudgie the Whale or Cookie Puss (Cookie O’Puss in March), but this one from the mid-1980s that has a song as sultry as the Nestle Alpine White “Sweet Dreams” ad. No, it’s not as fun as Cookie Puss, but holy crap it worked. Or maybe–because this is a motif in this blog entry–it was just on me and my sister, who used to annoyingly sing “Car-vel. Ice-cream. Car-vel. Ice-cream” at random times. I think it also didn’t hurt that there was an actual Carvel just up the block from us (that is still in business, by the way), and it’s where we got just about every one of our birthday cakes from when we were kids in addition to Flying Saucers and soft serve ice cream.
Now, I realize that the last several paragraphs or so were basically like one of those “DOES ANYONE REMEMBER THIS” posts that you see someone throw up on Facebook (and they’re always in all caps … like I don’t need you to yell REMEMBER BENSON at me, Frank), but dammit, I fell down a rabbit hole once I decided to watch that Shop-Rite commercial because I couldn’t get it out of my head. And the cool thing is that commercials like these are still around and I don’t think they will ever die as long as there are local businesses who really want you to come in and spend some money.