90 minutes of Japanese TV commercials from the 1980s

[boingboing]

[Permalink]

[nixiebunny]

There’s something about eighties hair.

[bwv812]

@boingboing

I today offer you a 40-minute mix of not music but advertisements, a viewing experience that should get you as close as possible to feeling what it was to be in the Japanese 80s.

Seriously, you need to stop. Japanese TV commercials allow you to feel what it was like to be in the Japanese '80s? Well, then there shouldn’t be much need to time-travel there, nor am I sure many Japanese would look at the commercials and they captured daily life in Japan during that time.

[telecinese]

No, not literally. But anyone who has had the experience of trying on some forgotten unlabelled VHS tape and finding the half-remembered commercials were the most interesting part of whatever was recorded will know what the author is talking about.

As someone who was born in that era (though not in Japan) I’m finding this series a inspiring slice of weird alternate-life 19AOs pseudonostalgia.

[bwv812]

@telecinese

No, not literally. But anyone who has had the experience of trying on some forgotten unlabelled VHS tape and finding the half-remembered commercials were the most interesting part of whatever was recorded will know what the author is talking about.

Sure, commercials from your own culture may bring on waves of nostalgia—but they don’t give you an idea of what life was actually like during that time. This goes doubly when we’re talking about weird Japanese TV.

[Abaronofsky]

Any Suntory commercials in there?

[telecinese]

You’re right, ‘what life was like’ is pure hyperbole. Still! There’s worth in there to me, even if not to you.

I find old commercials (particularly low-budget, local ones that were definitely not meant for the ages) to be a fascinating glimpse, even badly distorted through the lens of commerce, on the culture, fashions, technology, design sense and aspirations of any place and age.

The fact they’re so disposable and age badly makes them, in my opinion, a particularly good indicator of their time and place compared to more timeless things. Kind of like the way (to me at least, since I like old cars enough to care) the approximate age of a street scene is better gauged by the cars than the buildings.

[antdude]

That is only part 1/one.

[bwv812]

@telecinese

You’re right, ‘what life was like’ is pure hyperbole. Still! There’s worth in there to me, even if not to you.

There’s worth in there, but his style is just so yellow-feverish that it’s ridiculous. Over half of his posts have been about “Asia” (by which he seems to mean Japan, South Korea, and eastern China), and I shudder to think how he would have up Pescovitz’s The History of Sushi post.