1mo ago

I Miss Old TV Commercials.

Or rather, how they were broadcast on television.

They had a space and a time, they were not uncomfortably specific, you could make the decision not to watch them by changing the channel or go to the bathroom for a while and come back. Programs and movies were designed or edited in such a way that rather than an interruption, they felt like a pause.

Because that's what they were: Advertising Pauses.

Not like now, which are Advertising Interruptions, Advertising Invasions.

Advertising "Disrespect for the Privacy and Time of the Users".

EDIT: I love how almost everyone assumed that by "old" I meant commercials from the last century (90s, 80s) when I was thinking more like mid 2000s

19 comments

Also, a lot of them were actually funny and creative.
- Very few were funny or creative. If anything they were heavily trending away from anything funny or creative towards loud and obnoxious. They knew everyone got up to go to the bathroom or kitchen and wanted to make sure that you still heard and recognized their ad. Then with the advent of tivo type recording, they did their best to make the first and last 15 seconds as abusive as possible, that way they could force their advertising into your brain before you had a chance to grab the remote and skip it, or during that little bit of commercial you had to watch just before the show returned.
  While I will admit that there were some absolutely amazing commercials, like the Trunk Monkey, those were not only incredibly rare, but also being rapidly abandoned. I think modern commercials may actually be better overall than those of the past. Just look at what Ryan Reynolds is doing. I loath commercials, but I am also subscribed to his YouTube channel and regularly watch his "videos" because they're amusing.
  
  Silverberg's Law states that 90% of everything is crap.
  We tend to ignore the lousy stuff and focus on the great things.

I watched some TV with family during Christmas. I had forgotten just how much of a time drain commercials are. Sure it's more generic and some can be fun but it's not worth it to lose an extra half hour for a one hour show. And I don't think the times have changed, it was the same when I was a kid.
- If you’re in the U.S. it’s about 16 minutes per 1 hour show.
  
  That's not as bad I guess. I'm not in the US and I remember once watching an entire episode of House of Cards on my phone during the commercial breaks of a movie on TV.

Lately we’ve been acquiring and rewatching a lot of old 90s cartoons/TV shows with our daughter, and i feel this so much. The fade-to-black at a particular scene for the commercial break, the ‘brought to you by…’ that’s written in. And then the nostalgic memory of the types of commercials that would play, like for different toys and such that were sometimes just as exciting to watch as whatever show was on!
- dunno their age, but toonamiaftermath is a great site/stream. they add old commercials with old shows.

it's wild that a bulk of my youtube history is just hour long compilations of commercials and news intros from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
- They were something else back then.

I don't. Jingles were annoying and would get stuck in my head all the time. I'm glad they died in the early 90s.

grandpa always muted commercials. Searching for old ones on YouTube, though, can be (a) a great nostalgia hit and (b) great language practice or culture study when looking at those of other countries

Every once in a while I'll see some advertising from 30-some years ago when I watched a lot of TV and it'll be instantly familiar. Mostly it just makes me wonder what similar kind of garbage is filling up the heads of people still habitually subjecting themselves to TV commercials today, which they'll be stuck with for the rest of their lives.

https://youtu.be/vc0Lk00zoA0?t=397

Just watch Netflix on the lowest tier

I don't really understand the appeal of advertising propaganda, like I get in this system everything has a price and the broadcast price was manipulative commercials trading time for content. Then cable TV offered an alternative, no commercials but subscription cost, trading money for content. Then the cable companies tried to get as greedy as possible with ads + sub, and people paying with time went to ad based streaming services and people paying with money went to subscription based services, then most streaming services made the same greediest move as cable TV with ads + sub. Being nostalgic for commercial breaks feels like being nostalgic for something I never wanted to being with.
- You didn't get what I meant...
  
  Maybe, or maybe we just have different opinions on commercials?
  You miss the nostalgia of old commercials not because of their content but because you can skip them or content was edited to provide a break for them.
  I dislike advertising especially the old cable TV sub + ads style where you already paid for the content, and editing in breaks for movie commercials or planning an episode of a show around commercial breaks makes the experience worse imo.

19 comments