JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

CLOWNS! CLOWNS! AAAAHHHH! The boy in front is keeping his cool in the face of clowns preparing to promise him a balloon and floating paper ships , have him as the main course for dinner, or other nefarious deeds. Phobia of clowns wasn't a childhood problem, as encounters were few and far between. I even went out as one for an early Halloween outing, with emphasis on cute over scary—no grotesque face, just dabs of red on my cheeks. The only time I was disturbed by a clown-like figure occurred when I was barely school age. It happened on the lone trip Dad and I made to the CNE without the rest of the family, which also provided my first long distance train trip on the Windsor to Toronto run. Wendy's had a booth on the grounds with a woman dressed as the burger chain's mascot (the chain had been in Canada for a few years— its 500th store opened in Toronto in 1976 ). As we approached her, unease set in. Something about a girl with yarn for hair, an old-fashioned dress and ...

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...