Even my German friends mimic this commercial every once in awhile:


27 comments

  1. Everything that happened after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered by…someone.

  2. June 3, 1992.

    Bill Clinton goes on The Arsenio Hall Show and plays the saxophone.

    It absolutely was memorable to people who saw it, but I think it changed both politics and pop culture forever in the US.

    Until then, national politicians seldom appeared on popular entertainment like that. On the rare occasion they did, it was as a brief cameo and always felt awkward. (Richard Nixon’s cameo appearance on Laugh In, for example).

    The Democratic nominee for President going on the hottest, most popular nighttime talk show and being a relaxed, friendly, amiable guy who didn’t project that typical uptight, stuffy parent-like persona that most politicians had, while at the same time able to talk in detail about policy and politics, and could even pull out a saxophone and jam with the band on some jazz music was earth shaking.

    It absolutely was the moment when Bill Clinton won the loyalty of Generation X, and he very, VERY distinctively set himself apart from President George Herbert Walker Bush and his very formal, stuffy public persona (more people probably knew his demeanor from Dana Carvey’s parody of him on Saturday Night Live than from watching him in person. *”Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent. . .”*). Bush responded with a cameo on SNL the next week joking about Carvey’s impression of him, but that wasn’t even close to the scale of Bill Clinton just having a friendly conversation with Arsenio and jamming with the band, it was more like Nixon on Laugh In..

  6. Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Superbowl in 2004. It led to the creation of Youtube, because the creators were having trouble finding decent clips of it on line.

  9. When Lindsay Logan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton got into that vehicle together.

  14. Oh, so it was a commercial after all? I first saw it on Scary Movie (or was it Scream?)… The guy with the skull mask stabbing people. And I thought it originated in that movie…

  15. A few thing come to mind:

    OJ and the white Bronco chase.

    Trump coming down the escalator to announce his candidacy. At the time it was viewed as a publicity stunt, little dude we know.

    Clinton playing the sax on Arsenio Hall. After Desert Storm I thought Bush Sr was a lock to be reelected, but Bill got the youth vote thanks to that TV appearance.

  17. I keep thinking of that anti-drug commercial where the girl is wrapped up in a blanket. Her dad asks if she’s a pupa and she says she’s a joint.

  18. Well, motion picture studios fled the east coast to the furthest corner away to escape Thomas Edison, and that’s why the industry is called Hollywood and all the California tropes instead of West Orange and all things New Jersey.

  19. >mimic this commercial every once in awhile:

    I only clicked on the link to confirm what I knew it was. There’s no doubt that the “wazzup” ads are both influential and memorable, no doubt.

    I’ll chose one other “influential” and one “memorable” moment:

    The “influential” super bowl ad– Mac 1984:[https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY](https://youtu.be/2B-XwPjn9YY)

    I was too young to remember watching it when it aired (I was 6), but it is still influential. It’s influential b/c that was around the time that Super Bowl ads were really trying to grab attention (funny, dramatic, or otherwise), and boy did it ever. People were awestruck, and are still attempting to get that sort of attention today.

    Second, of course, it was the introduction of the Mac. Maybe that was an auspicious beginning (and Apple is hardly the rebel fighting the man it used to be) but there’s no doubt that the GUI that Apple pioneered (by steeling from Xerox), then was stolen by Microsoft, then was re-defined by NeXT, Mac OSX and iOS, revolutionized computing. The ad, and subsequent marketing, also made computers “cool” vs. “not cool,” and tech’s not been the same.

    And my memorable:

    [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thyJOnasHVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thyJOnasHVE)

    When this came out, I was in 7th grade. I didn’t really have any idea who Queen was (my parents didn’t listen to very good music), and I certainly hadn’t heard a track from the mid-70s. But suddenly EVERYONE in my school was singing it. Heck, we sang it in a SCHOOL CHOIR concert when I was in 10th grade.

    And I just saw a meme on Reddit a couple of days ago something to the effect of “If you’re around a friend and Bohemian Rhapsody comes on, and they don’t immediately try to sing as loud as possible in a range that’s humanly impossible, then they’re not worth your time.”

    There’s no doubt that the track is interesting, but without Wayne’s World I think it would have fallen away into relative obscurity — it’s long, it mostly doesn’t rhyme, it’s got multiple tempos, it doesn’t really have an amazing hook (except maybe the piano intro and outro), nothing that would make it a song that would be in the collective consciousness. But Wayne’s World elevated it and made it part of American culture.

  21. The release of Batman ’89. It’s hard to overstate how much that movie changed a lot of things we just take for granted anymore.

  23. Lots of real answers here and not fictional pop culture moments

    Tony Soprano murdering a rat in Season 1 of Sopranos. HBO network was terrified the show was going to end with that since having the main character of a show be a murdering sociopath was not normal.

    Fast forward 23 years of prestige TV drama that followed

  26. Black guy getting killed by the Hells Angel’s at a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont CA in 1969. It was shocking enough that a movie was made about it.

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