The second-worst fast-food commercial in history

I thought Rax was delicious when I was a kid and was sad when they suddenly disappeared. They had the best shakes. Arbys seemed like a kind of weak competitor to a place that used the fancy rolls but in the end they came out on top.

Watching the video I think Rax’s marketing department was just ahead of their time. That could have totally worked in our more cynical moden age. I also find it amusing how the video talks about Rax flailing around with different products trying to find a hit, exactly the same way Arby’s does today with their “we have the meats” tagline.

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now I want to eat at the nearest surviving Rax, three hours from where I live

I’m In central TX here, so it’s a lot more than 3 hours for me. Next time I’m in… <checks franchise locations on their website> southern Ohio, Joliet Illinois, or … middle-of-nowhere SE Kentucky, I’ll drop by. Given that you couldn’t pay me to fly in an airplane right now, that’s not going to happen any time soon.

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image

(EDIT: @GiantRobotPilot beat me to it)

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I thought, maybe I should try my Google fu and look for it myself. But then I realized I really don’t want to look at the extraneous results of a search for strong man pulling meat on Google. :thinking:

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For a few years (until they quietly redid the signs) I lived in “a livable community.” Which is a pretty low bar.

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It was like a golden age of kids’ TV in hindsight.

Where we lived on Long Island, there were no chain restaurants allowed and (IIRC) Roy Rogers was the closest one. The French fry containers were printed to look like gun holsters, and had slots cut in them through which one could thread their belt.

See also: Godfather’s Pizza. They watched us like hawks. Friend had to resort to cramming a whole fistful of food into his mouth at once. It’s as though someone else before us had tried to get away with it.

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Could be worse…
image

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The “Deluxe” had lettuce, tomato, mayo… Pretty tasty

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I’d eat there. But none nearby.

Arby’s it is!

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I miss ferns. I wonder how long it will be before the retrohipsters take them up again and start wearing ties to fern bars. Sure would beat the universal reclaimed wood look.

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I Immediately thought of the Quizno’s ad campaign. https://youtu.be/55oVPn7sFuM

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Me too, Rax was one of my gigs in college! I had forgotten about it, OMG. I wasn’t around for Mr. Delicious, thankfully.

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It’s interesting to see how everyone--everyone--jumped onto the non-sequitur driven ad bandwagon, making progressively weirder & weirder & more random advertisements even for products where confusion and humor don’t make a lot of sense. And yet even amid this vast sea of strangeness, some companies (some marketing firms) get it right, and smart, and some just… fall lazily into a place of uninspired absurdity. Geico continues to have one of the better conceptual runs, I think.

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We had one almost directly across for OSU. The thing that was the biggest draw for broke college students was the nigh-endless salad bar, which included pasta. About $5 could get you all the lettuce, veggies and carbs you could stomach.

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my pops owned an ice cream and sandwich shop in a small, touristy town in Central Texas.
He served a meatball pita. It was gross.

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I’m getting pretty sick of Progressive Insurance ads, though, and the LIMU Emu series has been just stupid from the outset.

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Does anyone remember a satirical British radio serial (I think it may have been called “1994” but I don’t remember) in which the hero is tasked with writing a tag line for Katzenbrau, the world’s worst beer? He gains instant acclaim when he comes up with “KATZENBRAU: IT MAKES YOU DRUNK.”

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Screen Shot 2020-10-09 at 2.23.37 PM

Mr. D bears a striking resemblance to this guy.

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As someone who was living in America in the '80s… also never heard of it. I’m guessing they never made it to California, and reading the wiki page, it sounds like, although they expanded outside the US, they didn’t make it past the midwest?

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A target demographic of toothpick users is…not the widest net you can cast.

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