It''s weird that almost ALL of that stuff on the table, including the Encyclopedia set, now fits on a phone. EXCEPT the cereal. Thus proving we reached peak cereal in 1988.
Well, technically the internet's backbone was already operational in the 70's as military and academic "super-highways", but it was painfully slow via dial-up modems. As you've mentioned, it really didn't become popular till the mid 90's. I remember my first "website" I have visited was 1800flowers.com around 1996, via a painfully slow 9,600baud USRobotics modem. It's forever etched in my memory as I was waiting for each line to be drawn on the screen in front of my eyes (each page took about 30- 60 seconds to fully display).... not fun, but hey you've gotta start somewhere. xD
@Robert Silvers < Well in the early 90s dial-up BBS'es were still popular (sort of like today's forums), and I didn't hear about the internet till the mid 90's, when AOL (lol), Earthlink, etc were the popular services.
@@Anth230 In 1986 I was using internet and email. In 1991 I tried the Netscape web browser, which was my first use of the WWW. By 1995 or 1996, I already had an Amazon account.
Who else here was a kid watching cartoons after school in the 1980s and 1990s and remembers seeing this and the 1992 follow-up about 400, 500 times? It worked though, I always wanted a Britannica and finally bought my own as an adult.
Oh, man, these commercials always made me feel so dumb! I had an Atari computer, didn't live near a library and my set of encyclopedias were from 1945, needless to say I didn't have stellar reports! Now I feel smart because those ancient tomes had nothing about flat earth theory, anti-vaxers and the like!
This just popped into my head after all these years. That's exactly what happened. I used to think this kid was the coolest and my father quite accurately called him a "nerd".
I'm reading through the comments here, and it's clear that most people don't realize that the announcer is the great Stan Freberg, and the young man is his son. Freberg owned an ad agency, and addressed this client by doing a father/son piece.
Yeah, encyclopedias are meant to tell you the very essentials of a subject as if you know next to nothing about it, and articles could also contain bibliographies so you could look up the books and/or articles for further study and research papers.
@@IsmailofeRegime Yep. Gone are the days of trying to find books on the same subject that most of the kids in school are also doing reports on or hanging around the copy machine in the school library with a pocket full of dimes cranking out copies. Now, kids just ask AI to “write a report on the Reformation in 500 words at a 10th grade level.”
Just remember those entire sets cost in all around $1400. Unless you were upper middle class and willing to pay that much then it was off to the library for you and the hours of searching the card catlogs and hoping that the book that had your subject contained the right information. That was up until the early 90's when millennials had Micosoft Encarta that gave us most of this information that Britannica would have in these volume sets. Then the internet came along to the masses and slowly and surely wiped out Britannica's dominance.
@@BillAnt On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few articles are basically superior to their equivalents on Wikipedia. It obviously depends on what the article is about though, e.g. one about the Hundred Years' War is less likely to be dated than one concerning the Soviet Union (and a Britannica volume published in the 1990s is gonna be very different to one published in 1911.)
*"Weird Al" Yankovic:* I edit Wikipedia... (as he vandalizes the Atlantic Records Wikipedia Page with the words "YOU SUCK!" in giant letters) That's from the song "White & Nerdy", by the way. Yes, Wikipedia now dominates over Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Before my 8th birthday in the mid-60's, my parents bought a EB subscription, and one volumn came to our home each month, until we had a complete set. I still remember the feel & the fragrance of, & the information in, those books, which I treasured cover to cover. They were our Google....but took some actual brain power to use, unlike now where any moron can Google or Bing something.
Bruh, a moron can run a Google search, but it still takes intelligence, skill, and effort to identify and integrate good information. In fact, with the unbelievable range of information sources today-many of them untrustworthy-it could be argued that you need /more/ intelligence to learn good information. Google has made research a lot faster, but it hasn’t exactly made it easy.
@@AdrienMelody Yes it has. I completely disagree, but I see what you're tryna say. Basic Google searches though, are much simpler that using, correctly, an Encyclopedia Britannica.
@@nathanielseymour8108 hahaaa ! So funny that someone commented on my comment and remembered that scene! That was a fun lil tidbit during my day! Good one !
Oh man haven't seen these commercials in like so long. I remember watching these on Nickelodeon in the early 90s. This is definitely the one I remember the most even though this came out in 1987.
@@commercialbreakdown694 They used to have encyclopedia displays in supermarkets. They would give you the 'A' volume for free and you would have to pay if you wanted the other volumes of the set.
@@BillAnt "Hundreds" is an understatement. The whole set cost at least a thousand dollars, which in today's money is more like $3,000, hence why so many families opted to pay in installments.
I'm a used bookseller - Those sets complete and in good condition still can be worth hundreds despite their age - The full sets with the bookshelf, even more.
I use to sell Encyclopedia Britannica’s when I was a kid in college. If I remember correctly, we’re going back over thirty years, you got a commission of three hundred plus dollars for every subscription sold; though you were an independent contractor so you had to place a bunch of the dough to the side for taxes. And on your third sale you could trade the commission for a set of your own encyclopedias. I actually wish I had held on to them; but they took up a hell of a lot of room.
Back in 2000 I was in middle school in the 6ths grade I was 12 at the time My computer lab teacher said I've been working with computers for 30 something years and a book holds more information than 1,000 web pages and this commercial reminds me of that. Making a small stash of books Superior over a computer and nowadays the computer and internet is winning.
It's great to see how far technology has come. Superior information from the greatest minds of our time is now only a click away at /r/science But it's also sad to see what is clearly a destined redditor being trapped in the internet dark ages. I'm sure he would have been a valued contributor over at /r/atheism and /r/theredpill
+Milton Dew Funnily he grew up to be a comedian named Adam Conover and the exact opposite of a reddit neckbeard. He's a cast member at CollegeHumor and has worked with Amy Schumer, neckbeards' favorite "fat dumb feminist skank." He is still proudly annoying, but much funnier about it. This is one of his recent tweets: "If your #MasculinitySoFragile that you care about being perceived as an “alpha male”, you’re a beta male.
@@Bluerabbit42 The absolute fuck are you talking about??? DONAVAN FREBERG. I can't believe I almost spread this stupid shit to a friend before wisely I fact-checked it.
ROFL!!!!! makes me want to call that number!! xD they used to have one of those encyclopedias at my middle school, and we used it quite often.... then encarta happened xD
At one point in history (the 80s), somebody thought this kid was cool. Cool enough to sell encyclopedias. These commercials sold a ton of them. That means this kid was cool enough to sell encyclopedias to a lot of parents in the 80s. You just know he spent some time inside lockers in high school.
This kid is just as sassy, but not *quite* as discourteous as the kid in the follow-up commercial from 1989. We loved it so much, that we dedicated an entire episode to unpacking the many questionable choices that went into the marketing: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VTaZ4HTJ_fM.html
the standard set shown here went for $1400. With inflation adjustment, that's just about $3000 today. Not something a typical family household could afford.
That would go along well with his video camera and CD Discman.....He probably had a cell phone and a LaserDisc player hooked up to a 50" rear projection TV.
Wow, I haven't thought of this nerd in over twenty years, and now I realize that the passage of time does not erase the fact that he was a jerk and a turd, and he always will be.
His father, Stan Freberg, wrote, produced, and directed the commercials in this campaign. Freberg often used a meta-satirical approach in his commercials. He could get away with it, but, in a teenager, it came off as obnoxiously smarmy.
yeah back then they were little more than typewriters except of course you could correct your mistakes before printing the finished product (report, etc.). No whiteout needed lol.
Hello, Crown Fedorus, lover of peace, redditor, member of the NAACP and National Feminists Association here. I just want to say that the misrepresentation of women and blacks in this video is driven to an extreme extent and should be removed. The video has been flagged and the creator PM'd for request for removal. The amount of pig-filthy disgust on this website ever since 2011 has made me cringe. I also would like the owner of the video to know that I've notified the NAACP headquarters, and due to the racism in the content of this video, they will be requesting the US government to censor this URL from the internet. Thank you for your time. -Crown Fedorus, moderator of r/Feminism, r/NAACP and lover of peace.
I’ve always wanted The encyclopedia Britannica. But I had to settle for the knock off the ones that you you buy at the grocery store. I still like it though. No I feel really old this kid is probably what would you say it is late 40s now
Crazy how far we've strayed from then.. Now we have the vastest updating knowledge at our fingertips, yet the marketing, advertisement, and all around use of what we have has gone to unpredictably ignorant opposite end of the spectrum.
LOL The kid has a brand new computer but can't figure out how to use it to help him with his school work? I guess in 1988, the only thing a home computer was good for was playing The Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego.
Yeah it wasn't till Microsoft debuted Encarta in 1993 that having an encyclopedia on your computer started becoming consumer-friendly, and even then it still wasn't Britannica which was the most prestigious of all the printed encyclopedias.
