I Can Do Anything, I Just Need A Coffee

Here's a bit of nostalgia for everybody, 2 back-to-back commercials from the National Coffee Association circa 1984:



Yes indeedy, I can cut hit records, avoid a safety blitz and learn how to slap a guy without actually hitting him through the magic power of coffee. Inadvertent comedy comes at the :30 mark, with the voice-over talking about the "New American society," while the video shows Englishman David Bowie, and the uncomfortably long (roughly from :08 through :23, an eternity in a 30-second commercial) shot of the band Heart "in the studio." Yeah, I'm sure that's just coffee they're drinking too.

I do recall these commercials, and if you actually believe it they were made specifically because coffee was rapidly losing its already minuscule market share of teens and 20-somethings in the mid 1980's to things like soda, and the coffee growers were desperate to hip up this drink, long associated with lousy Maxwell House and instant crystals ("just add hot water"), served in greasy spoon diners to truck drivers. For a bit of perspective, the first Starbucks as we know it did not appear until 1987 in Seattle, and had "only" 165 locations in 1992 (it's over 17,000 locations in 50 or so countries now). To say that the drink has come back from the brink is a bit of an understatement. Looking back, I doubt that these commercials did much though. I don't think many people trundled down to the store and bought a can of Chock Full O' Nuts just because Kurt Vonnegut was hailed as a member of the "movers and shakers."