The ads of time

Commercials come and go, and most of the time we try to avoid them by timeshifting our television viewing as best as possible. For example, with a DVR I rarely watch live TV outside of sporting events. Yet the old ads that might have annoyed us way back when, especially the cruddy local ones, elicit different feelings a couple decades later. What was once irritating may not exactly be remembered fondly, but the feelings tend to a little more affectionate.

The A.V. Club's writers compiled some of their favorite local commercials. Since an old friend writes there, he mentioned some Dayton "classics" from our youth regardless of if clips were available. These businesses and pitchmen hadn't crossed my mind in ages. The one commercial he showcased still kind of creeps me out, but it did bring back memories of laying on the living room floor watching our console television.

I tried to dig up some other Dayton-area commercials from the 1980s but couldn't find much except for a few Renaissance Music spots. I'm not sure if I remember them or not, but these are the kind of zany (and terrible) local advertisements that are part of the landscape and shared past.

TV advertisers in Dayton don't appear to have many well-aged commercials on YouTube, but the fact that the Concord City ad and record store commercials are there at all is kind of amazing. Why would someone still have a 25-year-old coat store commercial on tape and go to the trouble of uploading it to the internet?

Perhaps these commercials have such pull because they're like 30-second time machines. Seeing them transports us to very specific places frozen in recent history. Whether they were entertaining or badly produced, these commercials don't comprise memories but provide recall gateways. That's not of any use to the man hawking winter jackets in the mid-1980s, but for the rest of us who put up with the ads on our TV sets, it redeems him and his compatriots a little.