First you must watch this commercial from the 1970s.
Did your brain melt from the campiness of it all? Mine nearly did and I've watched it repeatedly today. And not just because I'm a glutton for punishment, either.
If you were alive in the early to mid-seventies, you may have even seen it on TV.
The interesting part? As the commercial opens, there's a little blonde boy in the center of the screen swinging something.
That's Eric.
You can see him again around 40-42 seconds in: he's immediately to the left of the bizarrely elongated weirdo-in-yellow's hat. (That poor man. I bet he didn't have a single date after this commercial aired.) He's practically outside of the shot. In the very next shot, he is.
Eric remembers this commercial especially for the scene at the end where they're all sitting in the tree eating candy. (I couldn't find him in that shot and trust me, I looked. They may have cut his head off, at the top of the screen.) They'd eat it, the director would call "Cut!" and then they'd all spit out partly chewed chocolate onto the ground at the base of the tree and get their hands wiped down. Bleah! Why? Because it was melting in their hands as they were shooting the commercial. Ahhh! Commercials!
When it was over, they gave the kids a big old box of the candy for having been in the commercial. Wasn't that nice? Oh, but that just happened to have been the year everyone was getting rid of items that had been colored with Red #5. Remember that? And the boxes they gave those kids? Yeah: those packages all contained the Evil Red M&Ms in them, so they could no longer be sold. Nice one!
Oh and he says it took them three days to make this commercial. Probably because of all the kids being hyped up on sugar, but that's just a guess on my part.
Wow. The seventies were weird.
3 comments:
I remember this commercial! (Eric is your husband, I assume?)
And, yeah, the do melt in your hands. We tried to disprove the commercial, and we did.
Thanks for the flashback!
Actually the reason we spat out the partially chewed M&Ms after each take was that even kids will get mighty sick if we actually ate a handful after each take. With that many kids it took something insane like 60 takes. They just passed up washcloths after each take to wash the melted candy off our hands.
Jennifer: Yes, that's my guy. I think we all proved that those suckers melted all over you. Isn't it weird looking at these commercials now? I'm sure I must have seen it, but I don't remember it, per se.
He was so cute! My nephews look just like him.
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