A couple of pre-TurkeyDay goodies…

by Diane

ETA: sorry, all the media previously linked to this is out of date… it needs to be converted to something more apropos for this decade. Please bear with me.

From fifty years ago or thereabouts, behold a couple of commercials I really love.

Both are German, from the postwar period. Forgive me for not subtitling them myself: I need to check some of the dialogue with friends who’re likely to more accurately render some of the dialect words. I ran into these years ago on one of the German channels we used to get on the old Astra analog satellite dish.

Each one is utterly bizarre in its own way. The first one, I’ve seen in both black and white and color — possibly the first version is a transfer from the second: I have no idea whether this ad ever saw theatrical release, as some early commercials did. In our cholesterol-nervous time, this one could very well leave you gaping, since it’s a butter commercial, and in it butter is suggested as the cure for all possible ills, especially overeating (the narration seems to suggest that eating too much stops up your liver and annoys your gall bladder into overflowing into the brain. I can just hear what my anatomy & physiology instructor in nursing school would have said about this). As part of the remedy for this situation, friendly German cows are seen making butter and then assaulting the unfortunate overeater with half-pound blocks of it, painting it on various internal organs…which the butter miraculously returns to working order after they’ve been malfunctioning. (The organs involved include not only the misbehaving gall bladder, but the kidneys, nerves, and heart, specifically the valves.)

…There’s a song, too. I particularly like the orchestration for zither.

A lady who's had a bit too much to drinkThe second one is an (occasionally) geniunely creepy ad for the well-known anti-overindulgence* preparation, Underberg. (Which really does work, by the way.) This piece of work has been seriously influenced by the German Impressionism school of film-making. Wild stuff.

I have to apologize for the trimming at the fronts and ends of the ads not being perfect, but in some cases either music or images overlapped with those from a previous ad on the tape. (Then again, maybe you get an extra shock for your buck in the form of the truly scary pointy underwear at the top of the Underberg commercial, or the cheerful band of chefs at the beginning of the butter ad, passing around cigarettes in the kitchen and pressing them on their youthful acolyte. Yeesh.)

Besides the Real Media versions of the ads linked to above, here are Macromedia Flash versions of the German Butter ad and the Underberg commercial. I’ve removed the .avi files that were here yesterday, as there seems to be something wrong with the encoding. Apologies for this — I’m still trying to figure out what went wrong.

…And now I’m going to go prepare to stop up my liver a little. To all who’re celebrating it, Happy Thanksgiving. And watch out for those cows.

*Read “hangover”. Though Underberg is also very effective against indigestion.

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