Whipped Cream Difficulties

I thought today I’d post some stuff that I think is just pure fun.

South Texas Pistolero posted a few weeks ago about the Roy Clark Greatest Hits album, and then this popped up: Roy Clark and Johnny Cash play “Folsom Prison Blues”.

Something else that popped up: this excerpt from “The Seven Little Foys”, in which Bob Hope (as Eddie Foy) and James Cagney (as George M. Cohan) do a dance-off.

These two are obviously having so much fun – not just dancing, but playing off each other’s lines. I like this almost as much as I do the Nicholas Brothers routine from “Stormy Weather”. (And both men were in their fifties when this was filmed: that’s some darn fine dancing for men of that age.)

(Historical callback: Eddie Foy was backstage in the Iroquois Theatre preparing to perform when it caught fire. He famously ran out on stage and attempted to calm the crowd and keep them from panicking, even while chunks of burning scenery were falling near him. Foy was widely considered to be one of the heroes of the disaster. And this is dramatized in “The Seven Little Foys”.)

Bonus: I may be stretching other people’s definitions of “fun” here, but you know what I find fun? Advertising fiascos.

Once upon a time (the early 1980s) there was a chain called “Rax Roast Beef”. It was mostly based in the Northeast, but:

At its peak in the 1980s, the Rax chain had grown to 504 locations in 38 states along with two restaurants in Guatemala, and two restaurants in Canada.

But selling roast beef sandwiches wasn’t enough:

During this time, Rax began diversifying its core roast beef sales by adding baked potatoes, pizza and a dinner bar with pasta, Chinese-style food, taco bar, an “endless” salad bar, and a dessert bar. Rax began to transform its restaurants from basic restaurant architecture into designs containing wood elements and solariums, with the intention of becoming the “champagne of fast food”. This transformation drove away its core working class customers, blurred its core business, and caused profits to plunge for Rax as others took advantage of Rax’s techniques and improved on them, as Wendy’s did.

This sounds like a company that is very confused about what their core mission is. But to make a long story shorter…

A new advertising campaign was formulated with Deutsch Inc. to create a new animated character named Mr. Delicious in order to attract adult customers. “Mr. D”, as he was known, was a low-key briefcase-carrying middle-aged divorced man who in addition to promoting Rax restaurants, discussed his mid-life crisis, his time in therapy (so he could, in his own words, “keep his hostility all locked up”), his odd affection for romance novels, and other off-beat topics. The deadpan campaign backfired, causing the exit of the marketing team.

I find this guy kind of annoying (at least in the first 30 seconds or so) but the video is short: “The Commercial that Killed a Fast Food Chain”.

The Mr. Delicious promotional video:

Question: is this the worst fast food promotional campaign ever? The first guy seems to think so, but: was it worse than Herb?

Or The Noid?

Or – and I’m pretty sure Lawrence would argue that this is the worst fast food commercial of all time – the “singing” rat creatures for Quizno’s? That pretty much killed their company, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2020 at 2:00 pm and is filed under History, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.