I'm pretty sure that this belief system was founded upon the following things:
1) The Clorox 2 commercial that ran in the early '90s that featured such children skipping around in Converse high tops, wearing various blinding colors (which had very very clearly been washed 1 million times without fading), while someone with a Jamaican accent sang a song that went "Jackie's whites are whiter, Bucky's blues are brighter, and Nikki is pretty as a rainbow!"
2) The Cotton Commercials. They still make me weepy.
3) Hanna Andersson pajamas. I have no idea how this line of clothing even entered my consciousness, since I never had any of them (they're just a little pricey), and it's not like there were commercials for them (I obviously watched a lot of TV when I was a kid).
C'mon though. How could you be a bad person when you're wearing these?
What were your totally unfounded beliefs when you were little?
4 comments:
Of course, after writing this post I've never wanted Hanna Andersson pajamas more than I do right now. Oy.
"The touch, the feel of cotton. The fabric of our lives." Didn't one of these commercials invoke people being rescued from a fire? Were they wearing cotton? Is cotton supposed to make us feel comfortable during times of fire?
It totally makes me weepy, too. That and a commercial where everyone gets voicemail and all the answering machines waddle away from their houses and a sad song plays in the background. I CRIED when I first saw that!
As a child I wanted to be a movie star, but I thought movie stars had to come from dramtic families and mine was my dramatic enough. This causes great ironic hilarity, in retrospect.
I also though bookmarks were for saving a page in a book that you missed, i.e. if you were reading "A Duck Named Ping," and one of the pages stuck together, you could place your bookmark there and go back and read that missed page when you finished. Imagine my epiphany when, reading a book one Sunday, my mother called me to get in the car for church. I was smack dab in the middle of my book and, suddenly, it occurred to me--I could place my bookmark there. Eureka.
As you know, I STIL have Hanna Andersson pajamas. Whenever you are mad at me I am going to put them on and be like, "How could I be a bad person? Look at these jammies!"
This reminds me of a This American Life podcast I just listened to recently called A Little Bit of Knowledge, which you can download here:
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1251
Act One is all about children getting mistaken ideas in their heads that they then confront as adults and realize are totally ludicrous. Relevant, yes?
On a related note, when I was a child I had an irrational fear of the musical Cats, which must have been opening on Broadway at the time because I remember there being almost constant commercials for it on television. My parents said I regularly referenced the "Kiss Cats" and alluded to the fact that I was sure these characters would come get me in my sleep. It took them some time to put together the fact that I was actually superimposing some image of the band Kiss (with their frightening black and white makeup and yucky pointy tongues) onto the commercials for Cats, and was convinced that the characters in the musical were actually creepy heavy metal performers, who slunk around at night trying to pounce on people.
I never told anyone this, but I think that Kit Kat candy bars also somehow factored into this whole debacle - commercials imploring me to "break off a Kit Kat" seem inexplicably intertwined with all of the already ridiculous imagery described above.
Dammit, I really wish I could post pictures of these three 80's staples, one right after another here, for your enjoyment (or, if you were anything like me as a child, your horror). Perhaps I will simply need to start a new post in order to do so, and perhaps that will remind all of YOU of something else from the 80's that you would like to share.
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