JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

Another example of YouTube proving long-term childhood memories are correct: a Levi's ad that stuck in my head for years featuring a slightly creepy alien warrior who uttered "LE-VI-ZUH!" a lot and chuckled at the end of the commercial. I'm not surprised that I don't remember the wussy human. The warrior made at least one other appearance, shown above. The jean-makers animated ads from the late 70s/early 80s are stunning in their design, rotoscoping (basing the animation on human models) and overall quirkiness (A farmer who shows great pride in his denim crop? How would jeans have fit humans if we had physically evolved in different ways?). - JB

From the mid-1980s, a cranky, talking, slightly creepy oil furnace from a series of Ontario Hydro ads. The furnace's face was plastered on billboards in Leaside during my last childhood visits to Toronto before my grandmother moved to A'burg. I don't recall this campaign having much, if any, presence around Windsor and Essex County. The furnace in a less malevolent mood.

Video loaded by Retrontario Today on Torontoist, I wrote about this late 1980s Toronto tourism commercial from the late 1980s that aired frequently in the Detroit/Windsor market. This is a fine example of Tony Bennett's side career promoting cities located on the Great Lakes. In the late 70s or early 80s (date not verified) Bennett sang the praises of Detroit in a TV spot. I've searched unsuccessfully for a video or lyrics, which memory tells me began with "welcome to your city" and ended with "you're one of a kind"—I'll spare you from hearing me hum a few bars. It's conceivable that Detroit tourism officials hoped for an impact akin to "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," but Motown wasn't as lucky as Capital City .

John and Mary Haines often smiled at each other whenever Dr. Frank Jones and Professor Morris Goldie came over to play checkers. They knew that Frank tended to down one too many bottles of Molson Golden, causing him to visualize Morris's wild mane of hair, well-trimmed beard and dignified bearing as the features of a lion. Morris won 95% of the matches, but Frank didn't mind as long as the professor provided literary odes to their favourite beer. Source: Maclean's , April 16, 1955. 

Tyler 8-7100. WE DO GOOD WORK . If you grew up within antenna or cable distance of Detroit from the 1960s onward, there's a good chance that phone number and slogan are burned in your brain, thanks to Belvedere Construction. I don't recall seeing today's YouTube find when it originally aired, though there were so many ads featuring Mr. Belvedere (aka Maurice Lezell) they may have blurred in my brain. Note the painters cap and the bumper sticker on the belly of the robot. Perhaps its mouth doubled as a credit card reader or spit out estimates for good work. According to a 2002 Metro Times article , Lezell named his company after both a street in Detroit and the character played by Clifton Webb in a popular late 1940s movie series...which later inspired the 1980s sitcom. While searching for more of the classic Detroit commercials, I stumbled upon this odd club for kids... I suspect that admitting that you were a member of this fan club was a one-way ticket t...

I was flipping through an old issue of Sports Illustrated when this ad caught my eye. The pitchman looked vaguely familiar, so I did a quick check on the web. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Peter Sellers, airline pitchman. As usual, Sellers disappeared into character for this campaign. This print ad and TV commercial feature "English toff" ( as DVD Times called him ) Jeremy Peak-Time. Other characters included Vito de Motion and Thrifty McTravel - figure out what ethnicities they represented. Apparently Sellers' superstitions reared their head during the production of these ads - nobody on the set could wear purple . Sellers was nearing the end of a long dry stretch at the box office, which reversed when he resurrected Inspector Clouseau in The Return of the Pink Panther later than year. Link : 1975 Time story on TWA management troubles, which fleetingly reference this campaign, calling it "controversial" Print ad source: Sports Illustrated ...

Wendy's was on an advertising roll in the mid-to-late 80s, hitting gold with the "Where's the Beef" campaign. Two others stick out in my mind: one where a customer is told to "step aside, please, step aside" and today's find, 1985's "Russian Fashion Show". None of these drew my family into Wendy's (we were Harvey's diehards until they changed the fries), but they lingered on in memory. Ask my sister how many times I've brought up this ad with no provovcation. Some background on this commercial, from Bernice Kanner's 1999 book The 100 Best TV Commercials : The commercial, called the best Cold War spoof since Dr. Strangelove , first aired during the week of the Reagan/Gorbachev Geneva conference. Viewers flooded the company's Ohio headquarters with complaints that it could jeopardize the preace process. "People don't really take commercials like these seriously," director Joe Sedelmaier said. "The...