Remember all those zany, kitschy TV ads for Mentos, complete with that awkward jingle and those odd, off-culture story lines — clearly the effort of someone to save money by just transplanting the European commercials for the Dutch candy to America?
Well, the truth is a bit more interesting.
For reasons I won’t go into at the moment, I was having a email conversation with co-workers that wandered into the topic of Mentos commercials. Most people assume that these commercials, which practically define the term kitsch, are filmed in Germany or the Netherlands–the (fresh)maker, Van Melle, is a Dutch company–and poorly adapted for an American audience. Not so, wrote a coworker, claiming that it is a little-known fact that the commercials are actually filmed with struggling actors in Los Angeles backlots.
(via InstaPundit)
And, of course, Van Melle’s US HQ is in Erlanger, KY, a Cincinnati, OH suburb known for little beyond a horse track and the nearby Cincinnati airport. I lived in Erlanger for two years, and my favorite comics/games shop is just a couple of miles of the Van Melle building.
I always considered the out-of-touchness of the commercials as coming from the general out-of-synch nature of Cincinnati, a city perpetually 10-20 years (if not more…) behind most of the USA.
So howzcum I’ve never seen one of these commercials?
Because you’ve blotted it out of your memory, no doubt. They were impossible to ignore only a few years back.
Here is a site I remembered that describes them in more detail. Interestingly, the site proper no longer has the info, but the Google cache does.
Okay, here‘s where the information is still online.
Hmm. Several of them do seem vaguely familiar.
Maybe there are advantages to having a poor… Whaddyacallit? Memory!