I hadn't planned to spend this week noting the strange undercurrents of seemingly dull seventies TV commercials, but the actor Dick Wilson has died at the age of 91, and his lasting fame came from one role.
Gee, that's...
...um, uh..."a whole inch," that's kind of...
...well, that's just creepy. From the sledgehammer innuendos to the portrait of a network of suburban squeezing fetishists to Mr. Whipple's chilling, shameful inability to admit his own addiction, these commercials could only have been produced and accepted by a nation desperately trying to keep its collective id closeted.
It's weird. I grew up with these things, and never really paid any attention to them. Looking at them now, the only reaction is, What the hell were they thinking? But what were we all thinking? These ads manage to be monumentally stupid in concept, bland and uninteresting in execution...and breathtakingly perverse in subtext. Were we all too repressed in the seventies to notice how weird this stuff was, or too busy ingesting massive amounts of coke at key parties to pay attention?
