Saturday, May 12, 2007

How Manilow can you go?

Wow, I'm on a roll lately (that's why there's butter on my pants) finding nuggets of pop culture detritus on YouTube. Having finally found the "Who Broke My Window" PSA, I tried to think of other things I had yet to find.

And for some reason, I thought of a bit from a Barry Manilow concert where he talked about commercial jingles. I mentioned this here back in 2005. Long story short, there was a rejected jingle that he came up with for Hoover vacuum cleaners.

So I looked up "manilow jingles." Lo and behold:



Much to my amazement, despite having not heard this in 25 years or so, I had all the lyrics more or less right except for one line. Should you want to perform it with your a cappella group (such as Here Comes Treble), here are the lyrics:

When that jar of peanut butter

Goes crashing to the floor

And it gets smooshed into the carpet

By the brat who lives next door

Don't you reach for the broom and dustpan

Or that old Electrolux

For dirty, filthy, grimy jobs

Hoover ... really ... sucks.

One other thing I noticed about this is that as a kid, the joke about the douche jingle went totally over my head. "...it's disposable..." I don't know how that happened. I clearly had to have known what a douche was -- my brother was already born by that time.

Badoomboom.