More Vintage Beer Ads

Now that it's summertime I've got too much time on my hands to look at old commercials from my youth on YouTube.  I find beer commercials especially compelling, since they are selling vice, and in the case of mass produced American beer, vice that tastes like goat pee.  It might seem hard to think of drinking an Old Milwaukee as something glamorous, but oh how the beer companies and ad agencies try.  I did a similar post awhile back, here's another one.

Busch Beer

"Head for the mountains" indeed.  You'll want to run for the hills after tasting Busch's bouquet of wet cardboard and wood chips, a flavor that recalls my college dorm before I was 21 and could acquire quality brew of my own.  This commercial also shows how companies were all about rugged outdoorsmen in 80s beer ads.  Joe Blow sitting on his couch after a day of mindless labor downing can after can of Busch evidently had dreams of riding the range and roping cattle.

Dave Cowens and Bob Lanier for Miller Lite

In the early days of light beer, brewers worried that the stigma of a "diet" product would make it hard to sell to men concerned about their masculinity.  (They should have been concerned about their taste buds, but oh well.)  Miller got around that by putting a bunch of ex-jocks in their commercials. Some of the ads back then flummoxed me because these were athletes of the 1960s and 1970s, not of the 80s.  I did learn from this commercial's use of silly puns that Bob Lanier had the biggest feet in the NBA.

Classic Rock in Miller Genuine Draft

Beer ads in the late 80s and early 90s tried to sell their swill to young hetero men by promising their product's ability to attract hot babes.  In this ad a group of guys happens to be wandering through the Gulf Coast bayou when they see a group of totally hot babes.  Unfortunately, the ladies are surrounded by deadly alligators.  Never mind, the guys crack open their bottles of MGD, and the swamp freezes, leaving them free to party with some pretty women.  Not only is this genre of commercial extremely sexist, showing women as passive objects there for the taking, it also incorporates and bastardizes Mountain's "Mississippi Queen," turning its mighty riff into a commercial jingle.

Budweiser Clydesdales Play Football

Budweiser in the 90s loved using critters to sell ads, presumably to hook in children to the brand.  (The Budweiser frogs certainly fit in with that mission.)  In this ad the Budweiser clydesdales -the brand's original critters- play a game of football with each other in front of the Rocky Mountains.  (There's those mountains again.)  It ends with a silly joke and says nothing at all about the beer.  I guess Budweiser is just being honest and admitting that its product is nothing they can believably advertise on its own merits.

Coors Light Is "The Right Beer Now"

This right here ladies and gentlemen may perhaps be the most 80s-tastic commercial ever made.  Behold neon patterned shorts!  Poofy hair reaching to the stars! Horribly over-emotive singing over a lame butt rock song!  Gaze upon this if you dare.