Category Archives: YouTube Comment of the Week

YouTube Comment of the Week: Smurfs Pasta

Time was, you were nobody unless you got your own canned pasta. In the days of my kid-dom, every cartoon character was immortalized in semolina form by Chef Boyardee or Franco-American. Any resemblance between the pasta and the character(s) they were supposed to represent was purely coincidental; most of the shapes looked more like amoebas than anything else. They all tasted the same as well, industrial fake cheese and processed tomato sauce tang. I know because I ate every single one of these pastas at least once. I was a carb completist. (Although I feel that by calling these things “pasta,” I should have to apologize to some kindly old Italian grandmother somewhere. Perdonilo, nonna!)

The Smurfs received this tribute, of course, since they were on TV for roughly 73 years. Was the pasta blue? Of course not; such technology did not exist yet, and let’s pray it never does. The Pasta Smurfs looked and tasted exactly like the Pasta Pac-Man and the Pasta X-Men, which is to say carb-loaded blobs swimming in Campbell’s tomato soup. Uniqueness, verisimilitude, and taste were not the goals here. The goal was to make a canned pasta that you could put a cartoon label on so dumb kids (like me) would beg for it. Mission accomplished.

However, I do understand that the mere sight of these items have a nostalgic pull for folks of a certain age, myself included, which is why I found the comment you’ll see below this clip oddly endearing. And odd. Though no more odd than the commercial itself, in which Papa Smurf reacts to a Gargamel-induced food shortage by transforming a bunch of Smurf houses into Smurf pasta. Thanks, Papa Smurf! Now I’m no longer hungry but I have to sleep in a ditch!

Honorable mention for this comment that points out a continuity flaw in the ad copy:

YouTube Comment of the Week: Chef Boyardee

This Chef Boyardee commercial is an amusing artifact from the 1980s, and typical of a certain genre of ad seen at this time. You see, by mid-decade, people were starting to be more health conscious, as exemplified by the aerobics fad (and to a lesser extent, the jazzercise fad). Corporations recognized this trend and acted accordingly. Not by actually making their products healthier, mind you, but by insisting their products were healthy enough as is, thank you very much.

The usual tack these ads took was that [PRODUCT X] gave you energy to get through your busy day. Take, for example, this Snickers ad, which obliquely endorses the idea of chowing down on a candy bar at 10am to tide over a hungry construction worker until lunchtime.

This Chef Boyardee commercial takes a similar approach. Kids and adults alike with active lifestyles are seen chowing down on Chef Boyardee products because they have “no preservatives.” Either Chef Boyardee has a very different definition of “preservatives” or he’s lying. There’s no way pasta can sit in a can for months at a time and still be edible without some kind of Franken-science involved. If you encased a mummy in a can of Beefaroni, he’d be unchanged a millennium later.

Of course, I’m not here to argue the healthy benefits of Chef Boyardee. I am here to point out a comment that was recently posted underneath this video. Enjoy.

YouTube Comment of the Week: Rhyming Fries

It seems we just keep coming back to McDonalds, don’t it? Ads for this obscure family restaurant make up a healthy percentage of my YouTube haul, because their commercials were even more ubiquitous back in the 1980s than they are now. Especially if you were a kid, because McDonalds had an entire line of spots aimed squarely at children, in a way that would be unthinkable (and possibly illegal) now.

Most (if not all) McDonalds commercials from this period were huge production numbers, replete with choreography, show-stopping tunes, and the occasional celebrity appearance. The ads meant to entice little kids were no exception. In fact, looking at them with adult eyes, I can barely fathom how much time, energy, and cash was expended on these 30 second spots that would only alert children to the existence of food they already knew about.

Take for example this ad from 1985, entitled “Rhyming with Fries.” Just look at the sets, the puppetry, the special effects, all employed to tell kids that McDonalds’ fries are delicious. What kid didn’t know that, even in 1985? I never went to McDonalds as a kid, and even I knew their french fries were manna from heaven.

Of course, the real reason we’re here is a comment posted below this commercial. I try not to comment on these comments (meta!), but let’s just say it neatly sums up my inexplicable obsession with these ads, and possibly my life.