The thing about Cadbury is, everyone in the UK realises that if there is a specific tone of Purple, It's a Cadbury's advert .........purple backdrop for the Gorilla, purple dress for the girl with the eyebrows.......
Those tango ads got banned as us 90s kids were "tangoing" each other so hard in school playgrounds, the victims were getting ruptured eardrums. That tango slap hurts!
The entire ad was re-edited to change the slap to being across the cheeks because the original featured ears getting clapped & not only did kids get banned from doing it in school, the ad itself was changed because of complaints from GPs with surgeries filled with kids screaming with burst eardrums.
When the Cadbury ads first ran they ended without showing the chocolate bar and logo for about a week. The only clue was the background colour. Its similar to the Silk Cut (cigarette) ads of the early 70's, they were Posters and Newspaper ads, it was a picture of a purple fabric with a cut across it, the clue was the health warning at the bottom. I think XXXX did a similar thing 70/80s, they ran a set of TV ads, 3 per Ad break, bracketing a film, the product did not appear 'til the last ad in the final ad break.
Yeah I feel like it's similar to the difference in humour on either side of the pond too (a sweeping statement of course, but having a nerdy interest in comedy I see it a lot) - UK ads don't need to spoon feed the audience, rather they trust their intelligence more.
The shepherd ‘Specsavers’ Ad was true genuis, along with the ‘Hoots mon’ for maynards wine gums and combover man for hamlet cigars - all standout ads in my book 🤗but maybe not aired in this timeframe
My late Westie Deefa loved (or hated) that advert. He recognised the music, even if he was sleeping, and would dive at the telly. He had a thing for border collies! I miss him loads
The genius thing about the Specsavers ads, is that the catchphrase is now used commonly whenever someone in a group misses something, the chant of "Should've gone to specsavers!" will often ring out in those situations.
i was in a casino 1st hand of a poker tourny i had AK suited flopped a flush went allin got called anounced FLUSH saw i had Ah Kd one of the players said to me gotta go to spec savers Phil i said deffo these are new specs gotten today, damned things are broken. this got the whole table laughing out loud
And, of course, the Specsavers ads are a derivative of an advertising campaign, from many years ago, by a TV rentals company ... Should've gone to Radio Rentals ...
I said that to my boss after he knocked over a stack of full fish boxes with a fork lift 😂😂 he was not happy and growled "do you want to keep your job" lol
Strangely, I emailed the company to point out that I probably wasn't alone in being put off by someone shouting at me to buy their product. A few weeks later there was a new set of ads where he spoke, rather than yelled. I never received a reply, though.
My favourite advert was a squirrel running an assault course to get to a nut whilst the mission impossible tune played in the background. Once the squirrell gets the nut an owl says to another owl " i bet he drinks Carling black label" absolute classic, released in 1989 but really became prominent in the early 90's... those were the days!
One of my favourites was the 2 pandas in the enclosure with the guy sitting outside in all weathers trying to photo then. He breaks for a Kitkat and the pandas come and go wild on roller skates. Crackes me up every time.😁
And that advert first started showing with just small clips making you wonder what it was about, it was a little while until they showed the full advert.
The Cilit bang advert was a total send up the “it’s me Barry Scott” (who no one had ever heard of befor this advert), the sexism, the fake ordinary mums, the 9 out of ten mums would choose etc etc etc, it was just an absolute piss take from around the time we had a satire TV current affairs show called Brass eye was out, you should check it out to understand the humour 😂
There was also a similar Slim Fast advert. Some guy announced his name but gave no other details. Was it Barry Bethal? "..and I lost X amount on the Slim fast plan." No one had any idea who he was. He's wearing headphones at the beginning and has gold disks on his wall so everyone assumed he was a DJ. Danny Baker had a talk show briefly and Barry was his first guest, his first question was "Barry, who the hell are you?"
The original music for the Cadbury's gorilla ad was Phil Collins Something in the Air Tonight. When Collins was asked about the ad he said, "the gorilla is a better drummer than me." :-)
i said after the ad was shown if CGI then actors are out of a job if man in suit he nailed that gorilla to a T if it was a real gorilla then Keith Moon has come back to us i told my kids it was a real gorilla that they spent weeks training they believed me for 10 years
The man in the open topped sports car at the end of the Shreddies Nana advert was a famous actor called Leslie Phillips who appeared in loads of 1960's British comedy films playing smooth ladies' men, and his catchphrase was "Ding dong", which added an extra layer of familiarity for British audiences.
Me as well! And I had (still have 😉) two techy mad sons who would have driven me maaaad for them if they had seen or heard about them by their mates or at school etc….
Unfortunately for the sake of copyright, the Cadbury Gorilla advert had the tune changed to a dance version rather than the original version of In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins, but if you look, you will get the full original version, and it's worth looking for, it's amazing. Those two idiots for 118 118 were a complete pain in the a$$.
UK ads are very clever. They are so well made and funny, we talk about them in work the next day or at the pub, thus giving the product name much more exposure than just the original advert.
@@emmahowells8334 Apologies for my error re Wynne Evans / Bryn Terfel... I've no idea how I came to know the name of the latter, as am not a fan of opera ...other than a little trek into the realm of a certain operaetta: "The Mikado" by Gilbert & Sullivan (?) Which I attended as a film version with my then Primary School, aged about 10yrs old... (Or possibly in the First Year of Secondary School aged 11!! ...so I'm prone to errors re opera...😕☹️) 🏴🖖
I still can't believe you would get shoes and the free makeup. In the States you would have to buy the shoes. Then go to a toy store to get the makeup. For both, you would spend $30-$50.
The idea of not seeing the product at the start of the advert is to get your attention and wonder what it is. Then you see all the advert and the poduct at the end. One advert is totally silent to make you think your volume is broke so you keep watching. Brilliant idea
Cadbury's really played it well, good marketting trick to leave revealing what the advert is til the end. It makes people watch to find out what the advert is actually advertising and also you will remember the advert. In the top 100 british adverts of all time (most from the 80s), a similar tactic is used, hence why these top 100 are remembered more than most other adverts.
"Should have gone to Specsavers" has entered the British language and is well used phrase. Theres a tone of other great ads from that period. The Guiness Surf ad is one of the best ever made I think.
There was some good and highly annoying ones there, I remembered most of them. The gorilla one was great, but the best monkey adverts of all was the chimps PG Tips tea bags ads from the '70's and '80's, oh and the Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins ads for Cinzano were brilliant. They're worth looking for. Great reaction, wishing you well
Watching it 17 years after it came out and as American, it would be hard to explain just how much of an instant cultural phenomenon that Cadbury's advert with the gorilla playing In the Air Tonight became. The day after it came out, everyone, child and adult alike, was going to school and work and asking if everyone else saw the advert and how amazing and unbelievable it was. There were rumours that it was actually Phil Collins inside the suit, and that advert actually got the song back in the charts (before charts were all about streaming numbers) more than 25 years after it's release. A lot of people actually started to learn the drums because of it (I know two drummers who started after this ad, one if them is very high level). It still comes up a fairly frequently in conversation now. It was just the perfect advert, with perfect execution, at the perfect moment in time. And the eye brows one as well, for a very long time after that ad came out everyone was trying to move their eye brows like that. Everyone wanted to be the friend in the group that could do it.
We don't often get them here, south of the border, but there was a brilliant Xmas one a few years back, , with Raymond Briggs' The Snowman, and a parody of the "Floating in the Air" song, from the animated version ... you have to listen to the lyrics ...
In the Shreddies advert, the old man was Leslie Phillips, who was famous for staring in several Carry on films and in this is ad uses is most famous line.
I guess those probably only played on kids' channels. I remember seeing Crusha and Lelli Kelly on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, CITV etc when I was a kid in the early 2000s
I cannot remember the hexbugs at all. Lelli Kelly's, absolutely - but only because my daughter thought they were magical shoes lol. I should remember all of these, I actually watched TV back then lol
some of these ads like go compare were so annoying that we were putting in complains to adveritising authorities and signing petitions to ban them hahahaha
Watch phil collins perform in the air tonight live. As hes singing it, he slowly makes his way to the his drums. Its so good as he gets there in time as he does his drop. The crowd are excited as he gets there and applaud him.
There used to be a single free 'directory enquiries' phone number (192) you could call in the UK, but then that was stopped and a number of private companies stated offering the service (for a fee, of course). 118 118 was one of them.
@@stephenlee5929 It was free originally. A fee was apparently introduced in 1991 (but was still free from phone boxes). As a kid in the 80s, I remember calling it when I was bored. :D
@@Will-nn6ux I used to ring it, along with some of the free phone numbers on TV, specifically adverts about windows... And then would talk nonsense, saying things like... "Help, there's a squirrel on my window, can you send someone out" And even weirder stuff I can't remember.
I'd forgotten the 'Smiler' add. In 2015 several people were seriously injured when their car ran into an empty test car. They were stuck for hours before the paramedics could reach them. Two young women had to have one of their legs amputated. It's at a themepark popular for school trips and end of school trips.
yh, i went on a school trip there are got to ride it. it was actually a decent ride, one of the best they made.. was a shame the had to shut it donw coz one worker got lazy an forgot to press a button. is their own fault for not installing proper safety features tho
The Cadbury Gorilla advert at 1:55. The guy in the costume was an actor called Garon Michael, who is experienced in costume work, but not in drumming. He practiced the Phil Colins solo endlessly to get it right, sense of a creature that as Cabral describes has been waiting for the moment all his life. The filming took one day, and two days to edit it.
And the beer and cigar ads... Carling, Heineken, Hamlet, Castella, oh, and Cinzano with Joan Collins and Leonard Rossiter... The70s and 80s were the golden age for adverts.
@@Punchgirl4 They peel them with their metal knives. Then they boil them for 20 minutes. Then they smash them all to bits. Truly, they are a most primitive species." *uoroarous laughter*
@@AndrewHalliwell that was such a funny ad. My siblings and I learned all the words and would do it often around the dinner table. Over the years we can still do the whole thing at the drop of a hat. I’ve even taught my kids who’ve only seen the ad on RU-vid. Another one I can still sing is the one for Brown and Poulson gravy powder. Remember that? “Now I’m using Brown and Poulson, all my gravy’s smooth and wholesome, and there’s not a single lump in sight. Harry used to hate my gravy, Threatened once to join the navy, Brown and Poulson really saved the night.” 😂😂😂 And of course Shake n Vac!!
I agree with some other comments that the better and funnier adverts were earlier than these, from the 70s to the 80s. PG Tips/Cinzano/Secret Lemonade Drinker! To name just a few...also I always laugh at the one with the little girl who kept saying 'Bollocks' throughout the advert, bloody hilarious!! 😅
The guys in 118 advert were mimicking British marathon champion David Bedford. He actually filed a lawsuit because of the use of his image. Can’t remember how that ended!
In the Go Compare advert the opera singer maybe portrayed as an Italian opera singer, but in real life he's actually a Welsh opera singer, his name is Wynne (pronounced win) Evans, he's from a part of Wales called Carmarthen. 🏴 My fave ads were the eyebrow dance ad, the gorilla ad and the orange guy slapping face in the tango ad. 👌
I knew a boy called Barry Scott when I was a kid. He changed his name because of the cillit bang advert. Everyone just kept shouting "BANG! And the dirt is gone!" At him.
As others have said, Cadbury have trademarked the specific colour purple, which is used in all their branding and advertising. Also the man in the car in the Shreddies ad is (the late) Leslie Philips, famous for his portrayal of flirtatious upper-class tiffs and dandies.
Britain has strict broadcasting regulations on how much time a broadcaster can sell advertising per hour making TV advertising a limited commodity. So advertisers who were spending a lot of money for a very small amount of time went all out on their adverts to make an impression and get as much value from each showing as they could. You're right back when only four or five channels showed adverts there were no streaming services and satellite (cable) wasn't very common the adverts were much better.
The thing with having quite surreal adverts, which don't tell you what the product is, is that they entice you to actively watch the whole advert to find out the product, thereby ensuring you remember it ...
Try looking out for a few older ones, like the Cadbury's Fruit and Nut adverts, and the Smash adverts (with the robots). Also the Brains Beer Aliens advert!
they banned the tango ad because kids were slapping each other in school so they changed it to a fake kiss with his hand in the way so he kissed his own hand but as you may imagine kids didn't take to the second version the same go figure :P seriously though i remember the ad but yes they banned the slapping one because kids were copying it
Wasn't there one where he blew up a balloon and popped it in the guy's face or am I just imagining that one. Don't remember it being banned or kids doing it to each other at the time either.
@@mattpotter8725 There was an advert with someone popping a balloon yes, and that one was banned too as far as I remember for much the same reason, it was considered that it could cause ear drum damage.
Well I had never heard of Hexbug either (I'll stick to my wind-up and battery powered zoids lol I believe that was the late great John Hurt narrating the AOL internet. Oh and Cilit Bang said as "kill-it-bang!" Now that was funny! :D Great video, cheers guv!
My favourite ad was always the yorkie its not for girls, there was so much controversy around it, it also increased sales because all the feminists bought it to prove them wrong
I am a rollercoaster enthusiast and grew up watching the smiler ad. It put me off riding for years but when I first had my opportunity to ride I queued 2 hours for it and by the time I got on, it was dark.
Look very closely at the lip movements of the ninjas in the Mr Bean advert. They are deliberately out of sync with the words that are being spoken, to give the impression that they are really speaking in Japanese and instantly translated into English. This was done to mimic the the terrible translation and lip sync that had been used in a Japanese television series that had been broadcast on the BBC, I think it was on BBC2 during the mid 1970’s and was I think called “Monkey “, it was based on an old Japanese story about a monkey that had to undertake a task/ journey for the God’s to receive a reward and was helped or hindered by other magical creatures that were all skilled in various ways of fighting and all of the creatures and Gods were in costume to resemble the creatures that they were playing. The Monkey for example wore a sort of waistcoat and a hat but he had prominent cheekbones and most of his face was covered with a layer of corse white hair.
The operator of Alton Towers has today been fined £5million after the horror crash on the Smiler rollercoaster. The accident on the £18million white-knuckle ride in June last year left 16 people injured. Vicky Balch, then 19, and Leah Washington, then 17, were airlifted to hospital and forced to undergo leg amputations after sustaining serious injuries in the crash.
This happened about a week after we went on it. It was a brilliant ride but all I could think of was the stresses the bolts etc must be going through. Same as the "Rita, Queen of Speed" ride Yeah, I guess I'm fun at parties !!
Sometimes it's a thing with British commercials, you're kept guessing what the eff it's a commercial for. Others, like the Tango ads hit you between the eyes
The stereotypical Italian tenor, is in fact Welsh tenor Wynne Evens BEM. In later adverts he plays both himself and his alter ego Gio Campani. The Dolmio pasta sauce ads, in the other had were wildly racist and derogatory, but they were puppets, so they got away with it, and nobody cared.
My nostalgic adverts are before these ones lol. 'We want to be together.' 'I want to play for Accrington Stanley.' And of course the first serial storylined one with Anthony Head. Gold Blend. The Go Compare ones when you had actors/famous people trying kill him like Stephan Hawking and the blackhole.
@@BettyBordello Mark has been in so many things, but everytime I see him that is what goes through my mind first. But the fact so many people remember it and it was a fairly ordinary advert lol
This was a period when you could tell what 'the best' drugs going around the advertising agencies had been around 3 months before the adverts appeared. This was particularly true of the ecstasy and acid variants.