From the ridiculous to the sublime.  Thank God you won't be suckered into buying a lot of these products, since many of them are no longer on the market.  For the others, this is warning to enjoy the ads, but don't buy the product -- especially Rely Tampons which were pulled after killing many women with toxic shock syndrome. See notes

Program List
 

Somewhere in my reading during the year 2000 I stumbled across the quote "You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements" attributed to Norman Douglas. It then struck me I that I had found a use for the many TV commercials I had amassed over the years. The result was the program Defining the 1970's Through Classic Commercials. It premiered at the Clinton Street Theater, received a rave review from Shawn Levy in the Portland Oregonian, and did very good business. That was the easy part. Putting the show together was the hard part. 

The final program had 132 commercials. They had been whittled down from hundreds. To start with I watched the hundreds of commercials and took notes. Many were built up on forty five minute reels. I then thought of categories to group the ads in. Among the groups I came up with were Sex Sells, Hook’em While They’re Young, and Damn the Ozone: Hair is Important. I started grouping the ads. After a couple of weeks of work I had dozens of stacks, small reels and bigger reels. This was in the tiny projection booth of the Clinton that was already littered with dozens of reels of my films. I had 16mm intertitles made to introduce the categories to the viewers. Finally I was ready for the final edit. I had it done a couple of hours before the critics arrived for the press screening. Oh, at least I had reel one ready. I finished reel two while number one was on the screen. 

I took Defining the 1970's Through Classic Commercials to Europe in 2001. The title was changed to The Truth About the Disco Decade. It met with good success. I also showed it at the Interfilm Film Festival in Berlin, in New York and in Seattle.