As I get older (and older), I begin to suspect that I will, eventually, become nostalgic about literally everything in my past. Right now, I am feeling nostalgic for old TV commercials.
If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, like me, you watched a lot of TV commercials. Like, thousands and thousands. And as much I hated most of them, at least they were flogging products that I could…you know…actually use.
Since I cut the cable-TV cable a decade ago, most of my TV consumption has been via YouTube, and I have found myself bombarded with ads for various IT groupware products, web hosting sites, industrial-grade machines, religious groups, and exotic home decorations. WTF? How did the vaunted algorithms, in all their wisdom, pick this menu of irrelevancies to inflict on me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love YouTube, and I am grateful that it exists. And I know that they have to pay the bills somehow, so I try to watch the ads. (Yeah, I know, there are ad-blocker plugins out there, but I find myself morally opposed to them.) Still, these ads suck.
So, yeah, I am sentimental about old-world commercials. Here is a classic, landmark ad that I remember from 1977, the same year as Star Wars was released.
Ash Clifton, Writer 