Monday, May 7, 2012

Jingles

I'm such a sucker for them, those little, catchy sing song tunes warbled by a crew of sweet voices for Ovaltine and Winston and Campbell's on the radio and TV. 

First there are classics, like the Meow Mix commercial,(meow meow meow etc. etc.) "I am stuck on Band Aid brands cause Band Aids are stuck on me," "Give me a break of that Kit Kat Bar, " "Wouldn't You like to be a Pepper Too?" and of course, The New Seekers and "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke."

Tell me you never sang along to this:


And my kid still sings along with them. Whenever that Kars4Kids commercial comes on, she starts warbling along, in the kid's voice for the first verse and the man's for the section that sounds like Johnny Cash. I just YouTubed it, and I see that she is not the only one:

I don't know why I'm so fascinated by jingles. Maybe they are such a product of their times, that they are like a little window into a lost era, such as the twenties:

or the fifties:

or the seventies:

It must be hard to create, a little mind worm that everyone will whistle along too while their coworkers curse them for "putting that song in my head."

Which I have just done to you.


3 comments:

Peter Johnstone said...

i hear the Beach Boys "wouldn't it be nice". i sing the Persil song

Johanna Garth said...

A local jingle that always gets stuck in my head belongs to Mattress World and I can't share it with you or else I'll risk having it in my head all day long too :)

jenny milchman said...

Love 'em! Do you by any chance remember 'The Most Important Person in the Whole Wide World is You and You Hardly Even Know You'? It was some public education campaign. OK, now I'm singing.

PS: I think we took that particular campaign too far, fwiw.