'infomercials', 1950
Sometimes, often a Sunday morning, we would eventually find something on the air and, after a few minutes, the show would be interrupted by a commercial. OK, fair enough, but sometimes the commercial would keep going for 20 minutes. Gimbel's custom re-upholstery was one that sneaked up on you because they also had a regular one minute commercial. The bad commercial took you in real time through the process of re-upholstering a padded chair, from picking up the chair at the customer's home, stripping off the old covering and tacking on new material to delivering the finished product. Most Laurel & Hardy movies took less time. Another of that ilk was Vegamatic, which had a short ad, and a long one that demonstrated the slicing of every fruit and vegetable available at grocery stores in the NY area. Not quite as long, but longer than anything not on a shopping channel today, was an ad featuring little Bernadette Castro opening a convertible sofa. Years later, when I got married and we lived in a studio apartment, we bought one. It gets you right in the lumbar spine.
share