Turning Japanese (for a paycheck): Celebs in '80s TV commercials

For almost four decades now, the Japanese have been luring American and European celebrities to do their ads with big paychecks and the promise that the commercial will only be aired in Japan. Of course now with YouTube, nothing is country-specific, and so posters like this one provide with endless amusement.

This gent seems to have specialized in collecting Japanese ads from the Eighties, so forthwith I present these kitschy little items:

Jane Bikin


Jodie Foster (to the tune of “She Drives Me Crazy”):



A very shabbily dressed Peter Falk (and would we have him any other way?):



The personification of class, Marcello Mastroianni:



Mickey Rourke, with his original face:



An odd choice for studliness, Anthony Perkins:



Even more gawky studliness from Tony:



And since we’re in the Eighties, we need some of the stunning ladies of that time. First, Nastassja Kinski:



The gorgeous Diane Lane:



The fantasy of every teen boy at that time, Phoebe Cates:



And the absolutely perfect Mademoiselle Sophie Marceau:



Sean Connery, who turned 80 years old this week!



And a little more Sir Sean:



To close out, I return to the kinetic and busy-as-fuck Mr. Sammy Davis Jr. If you thought he was ubiquitous on U.S. TV when we were young, he also blitzed the airwaves in other countries. Here he’s older and pitching coffee and something called “the stick”:



There are two versions of this one, a longer one that loses sound midway through and this twangy sucker:



From a 1974 campaign, where he pitched whiskey and did impressions. Here it’s Bogart:



Here it’s Brando as Don Vito:



A dance video, with the trademark “con-chicki-con-con”:



And lastly, a frenzied Jerry Lewis impression:

Ivan the Terrible, commercial pitchman

On the subject of despotism I introduced below, I offer up some UK gentleman’s uploads of a series of TV ads intended to sing the praises of a brand of cigarettes called “Century.” The idea was simple: have historical figures tell you how great the smokes were. However, they went from a rather positive figure like Eli Whitney onward to famous rulers of other eras, each one of them puffing away.

More to the point is Catherine the Great:



Or perhaps maybe Genghis Khan (wild accent for this characterization):



But my personal fave has to be a very affable Ivan the Terrible. See, he wasn’t all bad!

The grooviest cola im Deustchland

I've referred to the Sixties as "the gift that keeps on giving" in the past few weeks on the show, and truly it is so. Just saw the documentary on the Monks (Transatlantic Feedback), which is a terrific tale of the one-album band that has ascended into cult heaven (deservedly so). In the film they discuss how the band worked with Charles Wilp, a conceptual artist doing ultra-mod ads for a German cola I've never heard of. Of course the 'verts are on YouTube and so humbly pass 'em on. Blow yer mind.

Ingmar Bergman sells soap

I haven't done many tributes on the Funhouse TV program to this Old Master, but I do love his work. It may have become fashionable to bash him, but Persona is still one of the great modernist mindfucks of all time (as much as it's been copied) and, curiously enough, you can see the seeds of that film in these soap commercials Bergman made from 1951-1953. One doesn't want to put the auteurist magnifying glass too close to these, but shorter, commercial enterprises have always served as "laboratories" of sorts for their makers, and so here we can see Bergman's love of old silent comedy (and I do mean OLD silent comedy, of the Melies and "trick film" variety), his habit of having performers appear in the foreground to grab the viewer's attention, and his devotion to the stylings of classical theater. The sense of humor found here does manifest itself in some of his movies, but is a bit overdone in his only full broad comedy All These Women(1964).

Here are the three best of the bunch:
His evocation of early cinema

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A wonderfully strange one in which the first half of the commercial is played back in the second half. Fragment it, Ingmar!

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And this wonderfully playful item, in which a 3D gal comes right out at the viewers to sell them, what else, "Bris"!

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All eight of the spots can be found
here.

Music in odd places

No greater joy than finding music clips I never knew existed. Here are two that fit the bill. A Tom Waits cartoon, in the Ralph Bakshi rotoscope mode:


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and a sexy Dole Banana ad featuring Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" from Dark Side of the Moon. Psychedelic fetish madness!


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Zappa scores a TV commercial (1967) with some rather strange noises

It's a rough pass at Lumpy Gravy here in a 1967 Ludens commercial, animated by Ed Seeman. Ah yes, a commercial that can fuck with your mind....


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One of my favorite commercials, EVER (psychedelia from the old blog)

See the light, man!

I have literally hours and hours of vintage commercials on tape, but I decided that this little item should be the one I first preserve in this format [the original blog], as it presents the groovy psychedelia that permeated some corners of 1970s TV (particularly anything aimed at kids or even teens, who you’d think might’ve moved on by that time), a sort of leftover from the rupture that was the Sixties. This commercial aired in the mid-1970s (or so says the narrator of this commerial-comp, the dubiously-named David Leisure) and it engrained itself into my childhood consciousness. It obviously is modeled on the Peter Max artwork that was literally every-freakin’-where during the early ’70s (up to and including the NYC phone books, which all featured covers by PM — anybody remember those?). My animation and psychedelia-minded chums would of course want me to note that Max was popularizing the super-psych style of art masterminded by Heinz Edelmann who developed the designs for Yellow Submarine. I still hold this to be my personal fave ’70s ad (the visuals are what burnt into my brain, but that catchy song has never left it either), but did discover that another intrepid collector produced an earlier Seven-Up “trip” commercial, and deposited it on the all-inclusive (until the hammer comes down) YouTube:
Click here.

I of course ain’t endorsin’ 7-Up by putting this up, that goes without saying. I’d also note in closing that the Elvis-impersonator voice of course preceded the King’s kick-off, so we can mark this up to the era (all through the 1960s and ’70s) where celebrity impersonations were used all the time in TV ads.


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