The entire commercial is hilariously weird. I don’t think Heart primarily used coffee to keep themselves going when mixing their album.
But seriously, who got Vonnegut to agree to be in a commercial for anything?
Vonnegut wasn’t a Too Good For This recluse like Pynchon or Salinger or whoever, and the content of his books made him fairly well insulated against charges of being a sellout; they probably offered him a bunch of money and he shrugged and said sure.
It was the sellout part that surprised me. I just wouldn’t ever expect him to advertise anything. But I suppose as cynical as he was, he just took the money and agreed.
He’s literally a character in the movie adaptation of his book Breakfast of Champions
OMG get your fucking drinks off the $20,000 mixing desk FFS!!
Does anyone remember a SNL parody of this commercial? I remember them using the same ELO song but can’t remember anything else about it.
I do not, but I do know that there’s a “coffee achiever” line in Weird Al’s Dare to Be Stupid, which is how I tracked this down. And then saw Vonnegut and was like WTF? And then thought WTF about this entire commercial. Did America even need to be sold on coffee?
I’m not so old I can say anything about the 80s, but in my experience people did not drink anywhere near as much coffee before Starbucks took off. Seattle was considered weird for after-morning coffee consumption, and even wake up drink was more often tea.
I am that old. I was born in 1977. Every single restaurant served coffee in the 80s. McDonalds did too, hence the famous coffee lawsuit. It was ubiquitous.
Remember the dumbass commercials with ‘hidden cameras’ and ‘we replaced your coffee with instant coffee and you loved it’? I remember even as a kid thinking who the hell is dumb enough to make a commercial about this.
