OK, so I've pretty much been addicted to BTN's "Nebraska Days" coverage marking the Huskers' entrance into the Big Ten Conference. The warm glow of exceptionally pure Husker crack bathes my brain as I nod off in front of the HDTV, and I keep seeing this commercial from Omaha's own food and agribusiness conglomerate, ConAgra. If I've seen it once, I've seen it 20 times.
And I cannot get enough of it. It is my new favorite TV ad.
It just strikes me as pitch-perfect in depicting the life of college students and the parents who love them. Particularly the dad. Dad is awesome.
I ALSO love it when Mom surveys the mass if comatose young-adult humanity crashed before her in the "student residence," then asks "Are they dead?"
"That one's breathing," Dad reports back.
Perfect.Just perfect. More, please.
"That's your son."
"That's our son."
"Don't remind me."
IS IT just me, or is anybody else really craving some Manwich right now?
Way back in the day, Louisiana had "Coozan Dud" LeBlanc and his Hadacol cureall.
Decades later and 1,000 miles farther north, Omahans had Joe Zweiback and his miracle-making Gera-Speed, with its "28 essential nutritional factors." And not just in itty-bitty amounts, either.
Down the hatch . . . and now back to today's wrestling match. Er . . . "rassling" match.
Little did I know, back in 1975, that in eight years, I would end up exactly one degree of separation from the biggest thing going . . . and a whole genre of popular music.
A whole 1970s cultural moment, as it were.
C'mon, c'mon, good buddy, put your ears on and I'm gonna tell you a story.
Remember CB radios? I think everybody had one in the mid-1970s . . . I know we did. Mama's handle was the Black Cat. I can't remember what mine was. I think I got on there once trying to pick up girls.
Come to think of it, now I can't think of a worse place to pick up girls. Stupidity, your name is 15-Year-Old Male.
BE THAT as it may, there was a moment in the mid-'70s, around 1975-76, where the whole CB/trucker craze met the entertainment industry. It started when the whole CB/trucker thing met the Metz Baking Co., purveyor of Old Home Bread.
It was a match made in advertising heaven. The matchmaker, in this case, was the Bozell & Jacobs advertising agency in Omaha. My late father-in-law was an account executive there, and a colleague there named Bill Fries came up with a campaign revolving around the fictitious Old Home Fill-er Up an' Keep on A-Truckin' Cafe.
Fries, Bozell's creative director, gave life to C.W. McCall, who drove the Old Home Bread truck. And then he gave him his voice.
The ads were astoundingly popular across the Midwest. The Des Moines Register even printed a schedule of when and on what channel they were to air.
And when the ads became a whole musical genre, Bill Fries, ad man, became C.W. McCall, superstar.
BREAKER, BREAKER one-nine, it looks like we got us a new fad, c'mon.
That's a big 10-4, good buddy! This thing might even end up in Tinseltown. Cement ponds . . . movie stars.
Roger that, Rubber Duck. You mean like Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds, c'mon?
Negatory, good buddy! I mean like Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw. You copy?
I GOTCHA, there, good buddy . . . read that five by five. Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw, roger that. I think you might have somethin' there on that . . . back at 'ya.
That's a big 10-4, roger that. Catch 'ya on the flip side . . . I'm out.
Pity Channel 15, the station with more attitude than assets.
Listen, if you run a struggling UHF station, and you're going to air snarky promos making fun of everybody else in town -- LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! THEY SUCK! I DON'T! NO, REALLY, LOOOOOOOK AAAAAAAT MEEEEEEEEEEE!!! -- it would behoove you to buy a dictionary.
Or hire production help who passed junior-high English.
"ForeGASIM" is to "orgasm" as KXVO is to television -- not an exact correlation. Maybe it's just that watching retreads all day and CW network programming all evening leads to brain spasims.
I am reliably informed by various corners of the media universe that this commercial for Duncan Hines is offensive to African-Americans. White advertising executives cannot -- repeat CANNOT -- have fun with the old saw that black folk got soul, but white boy don't. Only African-Americans may stereotype white people as being off-key, uncoordinated musical buffoons.
Therefore, we find racism in the sepia-toned hip-hop cupcakes. Therefore, Duncan Hines has taken the ads off the ol' TV plantation -- and YouTube, too -- because someone, somewhere may have been offended.
UNFORTUNATELY, this did not happen back in 1980, when African-American actors were prompted by the white advertising establishment to do national ads in which they expressed their longing for an unattainable whiteness of being.
Remember, kiddos, white cake is the best. You don't need to be pollutin' it with no chocolate frosting.
AND WHERE were the forces of political correctness two decades before that, when the racists at Duncan Hines were putting ads on grampaw's 1960 Motorola pointing out that their chocolate came from the "chocolate trees" in deepest, darkest Africa, and that what you did with that African chocolate was make devil's food cakes.
Africa + chocolate = the cake favored by the prince of darkness.Get it?
An absolute hate crime.
And don't even get me started on Aunt Jemima.
THANK GOODNESS someone in the African-American grassroots has stood up to combat pernicious demeaning stereotypes of blacks in American marketing.
Apple and its co-founder, Steve Jobs, have massed it forces for a frontal assault on the Evil Empire, otherwise known as IBM. The Macintosh attacked the Empire early in 1984, then fell back under a withering assault from . . . Microsoft and its new Windows operating system.
Jobs left Apple in 1985, victim of a botched coup d'etat against the CEO he hired, John Sculley. Apple was nearly broke by 1997 . . . at which point Jobs came back to lead a renaissance of the company, which began to dominate in products not Macintosh.
Now behemoth Apple girds for battle with behemoth Google as behemoth Microsoft continues being Microsoft but can't compete with Jobs in anything except the operating-system market. Right now, Apple looks unbeatable.
And it will until it is.
There's a moral in that -- not that anybody ever pays attention to it.
If you're from my neck of the woods, I can say one word, and you'll know exactly who I'm talking about.
Dahlin!
Of course, I'm talking about Price LeBlanc, the king of cars in greater Baton Rouge. I remember when he'd hawk Ramblers, then American Motors, then Chryslers and Plymouths, then Toyotas from a spare studio with a simple curtain backdrop and a couple of his products parked behind him.
And he'd give you free country sausage if you came in to the dealerships in St. Gabriel and Gonzales.
I ALSO remember, back in the 1980s, a night of seafood and drinking at the old Cotton Club just north of LSU, but only because Price paid a visit to the bar and proceeded to visit with everyone in the place, leaving them with his trademark "Dahlin!"
Price LeBlanc was the king of cars in Baton Rouge, all right. And now the king is dead.
Price LeBlanc Sr., longtime Baton Rouge businessman and owner of several car dealerships, died shortly after 6 p.m. Friday, his family confirmed.
He was 88.
LeBlanc died peacefully of natural causes, surrounded by his family, said his son, Price LeBlanc Jr.
The elder LeBlanc was well-known as the namesake for his car dealerships, which became synonymous with its trademark catchphrase “dahlin” ending each of its commercials.
The elder LeBlanc added the familiar slogan in honor of his mother, who often used the endearment, his son said.
Price LeBlanc Sr. was a life-long resident of St. Gabriel, where he started with a cattle business career after graduating from Spring Hill College in Mobile, Miss., his son said.
He made the switch from livestock to cars in 1954, and opened his first dealership in 1969, the younger LeBlanc said.
“He had a way of relating to people, a common touch, that he could bond with anyone from any walk of life,” he said. “That’s what he’s leaving behind with us.”
NO, THERE will never be another Price LeBlanc. I'll bet you a Toyota and a damn case of country sausage on that one.
Back in 1981, television viewers would, from time to time, see these ads for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.
Thirty years ago -- shockingly -- this sort of thing was perfectly respectable. Unenlightened as we were, we didn't once think we were being indoctrinated by leftist union goons.
Worse, if one came from a blue-collar background, chances were that the Old Man belonged to one of these socialist-front outfits. I know, it's shocking. Lots of people smoked then, too.
Now, thanks to tea-party edjumacashun outreach and Mr. Glenn Beck and Mr. Rush Limbaugh, we know socialists when we see 'em, and we take appropriate action.
And you won't see these commercials on the tube anymore. In fact, you won't see the ILGWUanymore, either.
THEN CAME the Macintosh in 1984. It had something called a "graphical user interface." It also had something called a "mouse."
You could click on an icon representing what you wanted or where you wanted to go.
It was a miracle. Look!
TECHNOLOGY. What would we do without it?
That's a great question. Just don't ask Steve Jobs.
Twenty-six years after he made the world safe for personal computing, he'd rather that you just don't bug him. Or Apple.
A college journalism student learned this the hard way when Apple media relations screwed her around, and she sent an E-mail to the top of the pecking order. That would be Jobs. After the Apple boss deigned to send her back a snotty-tot reply, a brief exchange ensued, and then Jobs got the last E-word: "Please leave us alone."
Waded through all the gay cyber-picketers to get to the Omaha World-Herald's website so I could check out what Rainbow Rowell was writing about today.
Found the poor gal on there talking about Mad Men as she tried to clean all the rotten eggs and scrawled obscenities off the floor with Glo-Coat. A couple more protesters showed up, not having heard that the paper announced it will print notices for gay engagements and weddings from locales that recognize same-sex marriages.
Anyway, Rainbow had to stop cleaning the floor to explain that Glo-Coat was a nifty old-time floor wax -- not something one might wear to the Max on Saturday nights. The protesters left, downcast.
PERSONALLY, as a Southerner, I relate more to this Glo-Coat ad featuring Loretta Lynn . . . a famous person who actually has waxed a floor or seven in her life.
And if somebody were protesting MY publication, they might get something else. Hit it, Loretty:
BUT THAT'S not important now.
What I really want to know is what's so damned special about Glo-Coat? Why buy such a one-dimensional household product when there's a product out there that's a floor wax anda dessert topping?
The warm glow of exceptionally pure Husker crack bathes my brain as I nod off in front of the HDTV, and I keep seeing this commercial from Omaha's own food and agribusiness conglomerate, ConAgra. If I've seen it once, I've seen it 20 times.
