Commercials From Hell: The Night Belongs to Michelob

I have been having a hard time finding writing inspiration recently, so I've decided to kick off a new series: Commercials from Hell. This is inspired by the amazing website Trailers From Hell, where commenters give glosses on old B movie trailers. This series will involve me writing about old television commercials and ad campaigns.

I have been consuming too many of these ads because late at night I find myself to watching old blocs of commercials on YouTube gleaned from old VHS tapes used to tape things off of TV (remember that?) Nothing puts me back into the past like these ads, since they don't get rerun, unlike the shows. They thus tend to be pretty amazing cultural artifacts of their time.

I want to start with the Night Belongs to Michelob campaign. Michelob is a product without a niche today, but back in the dark ages before craft beer it was Busch's "premium" beer. This meant that it tasted slightly less watery than Budweiser, and cost a little more. As a premium product, Busch would have to have a premium ad campaign. What better way to show class than a commercial with Phil Collins and Genesis!

I am struck by the juxtaposition of the young singles in fashionable yet bourgeois clothes with middle-aged rockers Genesis. Did they think this was going to sell to both age groups? Did the makers of this think that Genesis was super hip? Phil Collins skullet should have disabused the ad execs of that notion. There's also the awful moment where a guy puts a move on a young woman and puts his hands behind her neck, bottle of Michelob in hand.

Despite those off notes, there is an irresistibly noir element to all of this. Neon signs. Steam rising from manholes. Rain slicked streets. The song may be 80s cheese, but there's enough minor key mood that it sort of works with the commercial. When I saw it back in 1987 as an 11 year old, it gave me a bit of a thrill. Is this what being an adult was like? Seductive glances from across the bar, geezer rock, and a Michelob in hand? It was certainly alluring than beer ads with animal mascots and outdoorsy men going fishing. Premium beer indeed.

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.

Vintage TV Commercials Nostalgia

There's nothing that makes me able to touch the past more than seeing TV commercials from my youth.  Since I see shows from growing up in syndication, they are not quite so uncanny and tied to the past.  Here are a few that mean something to me.



I had a really rotten day at work today, just wretched all around.  When I left school, the first thing I thought was "Calgon, take me away!"  Little did I know between the work, commute, babies, and dog, I'd be living the life of an early 1980s career woman with a family.

I had cheap parents growing up, which meant I never got what I wanted for Christmas, and usually had to settle for something lower on the list.  I would spend hours staring at the pictures of toys in the Sears catalog that I wanted, and imagined what it would be like to play with them.  The one I wanted the most, of course, was the imperial AT-AT walker from Empire Strikes Back, although the micro Hoth set was a close second.

Beer commercials always fascinated me, since they seemed to offer a peek into an illicit adult world.  I was especially interested in the ads for old Milwaukee, which showed manly men doing manly things outdoors, only to end their days by a roaring bonfire drinking an Old Mil and intoning, "it just doesn't get any better than this."  Once I was of age to drink, I quickly learned that it very easily gets better than Old Swill, even if the commercials still amuse me.

Last but not least, Energizer didn't always have a bunny to sell their wares.  Y'see, back in the 1980s, Americans couldn't get enough of Australia, whether it be the dewey eyes of Olivia Newton-John, the dulcet tones of Air Supply, the big rock sound of INXS, Mad Max going beyond the thunderdome, or multiple Crocodile Dundee flicks.  To cash in on this rage for the antipodes, Energizer hired Jacko, a muscle-bound, bleach blonde Aussie with a kind of maniacal devotion to Energizer batteries.  Because of my 80s childhood, I still long to take a trip down under.