The beginning is elementary school dance recital bad. “follow the hollywood stars, Snow!” Follow the people wearing cardboard stars.
As Snow is following them into Shrine Auditorium, she begins shaking random audience members hands… they don’t want to be touched by you! I couldn’t cap it because it went by so fast, but she shakes Tom Hanks’ hand at one point and he looks embarrassed as hell.
There is actually a decent part after this where the “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts” song is sung by Merv Griffin, and Cyd Charisse dances, while Roy Rogers shows up too:
Rob Lowe is Snow White’s blind date at the Coconut Grove? But I thought we were still back in time? And they sing Proud Mary about how “Snow White was working in cartoons every night n day?” What does that have to do with Old Hollywood and Coconut Grove and all those old timey stars that were there?
AND TABLES ARE PEOPLE. or … PEOPLE ARE TABLES?
Audience wants this to end.
oh my god now what. What is she balancing on her head. That’s how it ended? Her sitting in a big dress?
Lily Tomlin puts us out of our misery:
“and to think, a billion and a half people just watched that …. and they’re trying to make sense of it”
I feel like, if you lived in an area long enough you really get to know the news personalities. You see them on tv every day, they almost become a part of your family. Especially back in the day when you may of not had cable and there was nothing to watch in the afternoons.
Okay, so if you live in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach part of Hampton Roads you’re stuck in traffic a lot. Conveniently, Norfolk is where the TV station is, and they had a loudmouth reporter who ran for public office a few times. Thus, Road Rebels was born sometime in the early 1990s.
My parents and I both absolutely hated Road Rebels! It consisted on Andy Fox chasing down (yes by foot, in the street) and yelling at people who made illegal u-turns, or cut across shopping center parking lots to avoid a light. Real news. Sometimes Andy would bug someone long enough that a pothole got fixed. I found a clip show from 2005.
Mr. Food (nationwide, shown on our CBS station, WTKR)
You knew it was almost time for Young & the Restless when you heard Mr. Food say, “OOH IT’S SOO GOOD!” near the end of the noon news. Mr. Food died a few years ago and it was a little upsetting because he was one of those people you saw on TV when you were little. Like he was a part of the house.
Wednesdays Child was a segment where longtime reporter Don Roberts would interview and spend time with a kid who needed a foster parent, or someone to adopt them or a big brother/big sister situation. I don’t see any old Wednesday’s Child segments from the 1990s on YouTube sadly. I remember Don going to arcades with kids a lot in the segments.
Kind of a precursor to Dirty Jobs, but not dirty, reporter Joe Flanagan would spend a day doing other people’s jobs. He was still doing the segment in 2015, here he works at Goodwill for a day. Check out this commercial for 1991 where everybody tries to do a parody of Nike’s “Bo knows”, but it just turns out terribly. Everybody.talks.monotone.
Joe retired last year but apparently is still active on twitter.
Don Slater (WAVY [NBC])
Weatherman Don Slater was my favorite guy on the news growing up. . He’s still there! He still posts on facebook almost every day.
Finally, here is Don reporting on the 1988 Blizzard. I was five, and this was the first time I had ever seen snow, I believe. Or the first time I remember seeing snow. Maybe it snowed once when I was a baby. We live in an area of Virginia that rarely gets snow. It’s a big deal when it snows here.
Longtime Hampton Roads reporter Les Smith also appears in the clip. He got burnt out and last I read, he’s a relator in the area.
“I was being sent to Norfolk…where they didn’t like sailors…” – Terry.
Terry eventually began reporting at WVEC in the 1990s. However, in the late 1990s Terry was diagnosed with cancer and died in early 2000. His funeral was during a snow day.
I remember this article from Seventeen when I was 13, when bottled water was out of control. It was like we all discovered water for the first time. We could bring water with us anywhere we wanted. We could get water from fancy lands! Hose Water wasn’t the best tasting water on the block now. Celebrities carried around giant bottles of water like their babies. There was even a bottled water bar on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills:
Out on Rodeo Drive, where the high prices and desert temperatures can give anyone a man-size thirst, the hot new watering hole is the only bar in America where they water the drinks and get away with it.
The water bar is tucked away in the rear of lxi:z, pronounced ick-sees, a pricey clothing shop. (The name comes from a pronunciation of the Roman numeral twenty—that halcyon age, say the owners, when life is most effervescent.) On sale are 68 varieties of bottled water from 25 countries. At $1 to $2 a bottle, these still (and carbonated) waters run fairly cheap and are served strictly straight up. Ice cubes are a violation of international waters, says owner Steve Mills, because they “void out the subtleties.” 1
There was also a funny bit on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the mid 90s when Dr. Forrester and his mom was trying to get Crow’s “Earth vs Soup” movie made, and every production meeting and test marketing thingy they went to, the bottles of water kept getting bigger and bigger, just like in Hollywood:
Evian
Evian along with New York Seltzer and blue Nehi was my first beverage memories? I guess you could call it. I can’t remember my very very first memory of Evian, but one of them was from Troop Beverly Hills with Phyllis mourning over her divorce, watching her husband’s old commercials, laying in bed surrounded by giant Evian bottles:
(I only saw this scene whenever The Movie Channel would show the movie.)
I wanted this to be my life, Evian bottles surrounding my bed, watching old tapes. I was almost right. Minus the divorce. No man will marry me.
Perrier
Perrier skyrocketed in popularity in the late 1970s with an advertising campaign the claimed that it was the Earth’s first soft drink, and with Orson Welles’ voiceover in commercials.
This grumbly old [?] man who wrote this didn’t see the popularity:
5
To show that people would buy anything in the 80s, there was even a book about Perrier, which I had to inter-library loan from work. There was only three copies of it when I searched for it in OCLC services. (that’s a library reference for my catalogers out there) The book was so-so-so boring. So many off topic photographs of France, where the beverage comes from. There was only a few pages on the history of the beverage. I think I only saw two, three pictures of people with Perrier, including this bizarre marathon? Where you had to balance the Perrier on a tray(pictured above)? :
VANCOUVER – Some 130 waiters and waitresses ignmmid dismal weather and the old restaurant axiom that ‘nothing operates befmmitnoon’ to juggle an open Perrier bottle on tray five kilometers Thursday morning through Stanley Park in the First Annual Waiter’s Race.
Thetmen’s winner of the Vancouver Sea Festival event was Los Angeles, Calif. resident Roger Bourbon, a gourmet chef who is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the ‘the world’s fastest running waiter.’
His time was 17:58.04.
Sponsored by Perrier, the rules say entrants must be employed by a restaurant or hotel and must run in formal waiter’s attire while carrying an open bottle of Perrier on a tray. The runner is disqualified if the bottle falls to the ground.
Al Thompson of Vancouver finished second in 18:33.07 while the top women finisher, and seventh overall, was Julie Barrett of Vancouver in 21:51.06. 2
In 1990, Perrier was recalled in the United Sates due to trace amounts of benzine:
Told of Perrier’s action, Sirio Maccioni, owner of Le Cirque restaurant in Manhattan, said: “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Then, after a pause, he added, “Well, we have a lot of other water, the Saratoga, the San Pellegrino.”
Another restaurant owner, Andre Soltner, of Lutece in Manhattan, said, “Oh, my God.” Then he paused and added, “Maybe we’ll sell some wine now.” Mr. Soltner said Perrier consumption was up twentyfold in his restaurant over the last five years.
At Washington Square Bar and Grill in San Francisco, a bartender, Alan Sharf, said he had not heard that Perrier was being recalled, but he did not think a recall would affect business there..
“It is pretty popular,” said Mr. Sharf, “but this being California, we have our local water, so it won’t affect our business. It’s pretty easily replaced.” A bartender at Pierre au Tunnel, a French restaurant in midtown Manhattan, said: “People think it’s prestigious; it’s an ‘in’ thing. We sell a lot of it.”
“To me I think it’s the biggest hype since the Beatles,” said the bartender, who would give only his first name, Alan.
A man who answered the telephone at the D’Agostino Supermarket at 74th Street and Broadway in Manhattan early this morning said that he had not heard of the recall and that Perrier was selling well. “People buy it by the case,” he said. 3
Sales plummeted 75%! 4
Volvic
All I knew from Volvic growing up was that it was in square bottles, and it was more expensive than Evian.
Yeah, the yogurt company got into the bottled water craze sometime in 1997. I only bought it because this guy I had a crush on in high school drank it.
Dasani & Aquafina
I thought it was strange when Aquafina first came out in 1997 that it was in the same 20 oz and big slam bottles that Pepsi was in.
Dasani debuted in early 1999:
Coke announced Friday that it will sell bottled water in the United States, and Dasani is it.
“Suffice it to say, we think this is the right time for us to get into this market and that Dasani is the right brand,” said Coke spokesman Scott Jacobson.
The water, to be sold in a light blue plastic bottle, is expected to be available nationwide and in Canada before this summer. The name, developed over months, doesn’t derive from any specific origin but is meant to convey “a clean, fresh taste,” Jacobson said.
An advertising campaign will back the rollout as Coke plunges into a hot market. Bottled water has outpaced the growth of soft drinks, particularly in convenience stores, where water sales have increased as much as 30 percent in recent years. 6
I’m sorry but Dasani and Aquafina tastes horrible. It’s tap water. amirite?
Naya
Chanel made a water bottle carrier back in 1994. Cher from Clueless carried around something similar to it. Look, there’s Naya.
Naya pretty much died when Coke came out with Dasani. Coke stopped putting Naya in its coolers and it was gone. I only see it at Whole Foods now.
I have so many vhs tapes that friends have given me through the years and my family and I have moved so much in the past few years (we’ve just moved from house to house in the same town-but still, we have a lot of stuff!) that sometimes I lose track of my tapes.
Original Daily Show host, Craig Kilborn dressed in a tux to show clips. I miss seeing this guy on TV. He pretty much went into retirement after his Late Late Show in 2004, he tried to do a “TDS at dinnertime” show called The Kilborn File back in 2010, but it only lasted a few weeks. He was in a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese commercial in 2016. I love that.
Something that always cracked me up back in the day was The Daily Show’s news copter, their van, and their TDS 8400 laser copier that got main credits along with the correspondents in the opening.
Craig said they’re kicking it old skool, and someone in the audience said, “yeah!”
Can we talk for a second about the non-newsy set Daily Show had back in the day? What are those behind Craig? Drawers? With a sheer fabric curtain? While those colors were hot back then, Craig’s chair looks like it came out of a middle school shop class.
TDS premiered on July 22nd, 1996 – on Bob Dole’s birthday who was running for President at the time. They then proceeded to show the clip of him falling off the railing in Chico, CA (remember? I bought it up in my 96 things about 1996)
“He still got high marks from the foreign judges!”
“One of the best things on TV is that guy crushing the other guy’s head right before…!”
If you never watched old Daily Show, you’re like, what is Judd talking about? So back in the day, instead of a simple interview, Craig would ask the guest five insane questions. He carried it on to his Late Late show on CBS in 1999. It was Daily Show’s major trademark back them. There was even a book:
This is where the head crushing comes in. For the introduction to the segment, a clip from the film The Story of Ricky would show. I loved the reactions some of the guests would have:
“OOH! LOOK LOOK LOOK! SHOW THAT AGAIN!”
“Bristol Connecticut!” (the joke being that both Craig and Keith Olbermann both worked at ESPN which was located in Bristol)
Oh! I left the commercials intact so we can see what was happening in the Summer of 1997. The first commercial break is just acne meds, Excedrin, and a bizarre Rocky themed Lipton Brisk commercial.
The biggest commercial of all though was for the first episode of South Park, coming in August.
These little photoshopped bumpers were also a trademark back then. Usually at the beginning of the show there would be a big head photoshop of the people in the news that day. In this case, its just Craig and his correspondents, Brian Unger, Beth Littleford, Lizz Winstead (who helped create TDS) and A. Whitney Brown.
I’m so angry I can’t make a .gif out of this next clip. Vimeo doesn’t work withh with the vid to .gif websites. I totally remember this clip, and I think they even showed it in the opening credits montage there for a while. It’s a cop being voluntarily tazed by a remote controlled stun gun belt. He went from one side of the room to another, and then back again. The clip begins at 10:40.
Janeane Garofalo came and sang a song to Craig. I believe that it was an on running gag on the show that Janeane had a huge crush on Craig. She was even in a commercial for the premiere of Craig’s Late Late Show in 1999.
There was a commercial for the all new season of Dr. Katz. Dr. Katz was a summertime tradition with me in high school, up until my junior year when Comedy Central kinda abruptly canceled the show and stopped showing the repeats.
There’s a montage of “they’re not the ‘I team’, they’re ‘my team’” correspondents.
“So, this is not the holy hill?”
“Smells like butt to me…”
I remember this as if it was yesterday. Correspondent A. Whitney Brown interviewed this man who invented and installed in his scalp these snaps so his toupee wouldn’t fly away. I still remember the snapping sound they made when he put his toupee on!
Aw, George Stephanopoulos before he had to deal with that airhead Laura Spenser every day on Good Morning America.
Even the correspondents dressed up.
In one commercial break, there is a commercial for the Jennifer Aniston movie Picture Perfect, back when all the Friends stars were in movies. I only remember this movie for one thing: all the Gulden’s mustard. You can see two ads for it in the background of this screenshot. What was the deal with the Gulden’s mustard? I have to google this.
saleintothe90s 