I kept waiting for Ronnie James Dio to appear out of the smoke and start screaming about demons. (With eyes glowing red, of course).
6 Likes
Is it just me - or does this look like a GE attempting to carve out the “white” market segment in the boom box/ghetto blaster market? As opposed to Panasonic and Sony who took a more R&B, soul, funk approach…
5 Likes
This … this … is the best and most accurate description of a video anyone has ever written. I’m stunned.
7 Likes
GE never had a chance. If you were in the target demographic for this add, you wanted something with a Sony or Panasonic logo on the front (or maybe Pioneer) But what you absolutely did NOT want was something emblazoned with the brand name of your mom’s dishwasher.
The “hard pass” factor was only slightly less damning for RCA, the folks who made the wood-trimmed console tv in your parents’ living room.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go listen to some Madonna on my Sony Walkman®️
7 Likes
Plus you could copy cassettes (that’s why there are two transports on that GE box). Fortunately for the music industry licensing powers-that-were, the sound quality was so poor that no one wanted to listen.
1 Like
People totally did want to listen. Mix tapes were a thing. It was a good balance for the industry since, there was analog degradation of copies, discouraging copies of copies of copies of copies, but the quality was still good enough for people to remix.
9 Likes
And yet, the crystal goddess was wheeled in on a primitive rough-hewn cart. They need to work harder on their mixed messages!
2 Likes
Yeah I was thinking just that as I typed the comment. Not sure cassettes ever killed vinyl the way CDs almost did. I’m an old audio nerd and have always cared about this stuff more than most people.
2 Likes
It was too short for me!! I guess I’ll have to watch Kung Fury again for my fix.
3 Likes
I remember the first time I watched this video on YouTube, there was a comment: “you assume that this is a music video, but actually it’s just a camera following RJD around one day.”
while it lacks the post-apocalyptic theme so popular then, the intro for Renegades does the badass-crew-walking-through-the-dark-with-perfect-hair thing so popular in the 80s. also some of the best theme music ever:
2 Likes
Absolutely loved my Panasonic boombox. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that beer an ghetto blasters don’t mix.
Ok they mix well but you should keep them at some distance, beer IN a boom box is a bad thing, bear while listening at a boom box it’s a good thing.
2 Likes
Last Gasping it for GE… I remember when I needed a cassette deck for data storage sometime around 1980. I tried my high school Christmas gift Sanyo first; too much wow and flutter, apparently, or perhaps the nip and tuck was a little high. At any rate, I thought, “I’d better buy a product from a well established brand” and paid almost 100$ for a GE mono deck. It was awful; not just mine but the “it must be defective, here’s another” kind of failure to perform. That was the first time I realized I could be let down by a pillar of the business community. See where that gets ya, GE? 
2 Likes
I’m glad they did; this is quality content!
1 Like
It’s a total association for me. My speed demon step-brother managed to roll his white Fiero twice back in HS during the '80s.
3 Likes
Yeah but in these ads they were always those cool aluminium spooley cassettes that I could never find in the shops.
2 Likes
At least one of the characters in the GE ad is Black. He might be the one shown in the Fiero ad, too. Blame fog and poor digitization practices?
1 Like
Love that you can actually hear tape hiss on the video!
2 Likes
I mean, back in the day, I’d rather have an Emerson boombox than a GE boombox.
You could do that already in the 1960ies…
(I had one of those as a hand-me-down in the 1970ies. It doubled as a tricorder when we were playing Star Trek.)
