International House of Helium

While we're on the topic of old commercials, I thought I'd regale you with more! Although this is a political blog, this is a weekend, and we can't always bog ourselves down with serious topics.

I found what is probably the most hilariously bizarre commersh ever to appear on TV. As one who remembers the ad in which a woman praises Phillips Petroleum for preventing her face from falling off, that says a lot. The ad I found today is a 1969 piece for International House of Pancakes.

It's from before my time, but not by much:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt_OS54FFFE

If you don't think that's positively the strangest commercial ever to appear on the small screen, there must be something seriously wrong with you!

The music in the ad defies description. It sounds almost like a gurgle - much like blowing bubbles through the straw in your soda at IHOP to celebrate some achievement. The vocals sound like the Chipmunks! But there's no actual reference to the Chipmunks or to blowing bubbles in soft drinks anywhere in the ad.

When bizarre, creepy, or ill-conceived ideas are found from any decade of the past 40 years other than the '70s, people try to say the '70s were to blame. An example is America's proposed switch to the metric system, which actually peaked under the elder Bush. The same is true of this 1969 ad, which people try to pawn off onto the following decade.

Many claim that the ad was designed to appeal to the psychedelic style of the time. But folks who were alive back then claim they never saw anything else this weird! In fact, some who saw it in 1969 thought even back then that the commercial was so ridiculous and eerie that they couldn't believe they weren't just imagining it.

How uproariously strange is this ad? Once around 1983, when I was about 10, I was about to doze off when I thought of something I'd include in a rock video. Even if neither the song nor anything else in the video had anything to do with 'Sesame Street', I'd include a 5-second shot of Bert, looking down at his head at a 45-degree angle. His mouth would be ajar, and his pointy noggin would slowly rotate. Even that scene would be nowhere near as off the wall as this IHOP ad is!

How was this commercial not deemed too ridiculous to make it to the airwaves? And how many millions of people rolled on the floor in laughter when they saw it?