Posted 5:59 PM by Gene

We know if we had a following it would quickly grow tired and resentful of our constant praise of show-biz, but having not viewed a prime-time series regularly in nearly forty years (we have an explanation, which will emerge in due course) seeing the YouTube exhumations of old TV commercials we can assure ourselves the medium's stayed bad. Perhaps they're not the highest quality specimens, but as the SONS OF NEUHARTH made a inescapable cliché of the notion that the SUPER BOWL'S ADS are among the GEMS OF CIVILIZATION they surely must be. Heck they're produced by the same people; they've become a proving ground for tomorrow's genius fillum directors. And yet even the best are cheesy and dated, and while some of it owes to the bad transfers and YouTube's unlimiting video limits too much of it owes to the commercials. At least K-Tel's notorious poundings were never intended as high art and deliver the low laughs old pop-culture generates in that annoyingly ironic away, but these artifacts must remind us of the permanence of television's BAD, and how the boob tube, now minus the tube, will nonetheless stay bad forever, which is why we are not the least sympathetic to the striking millionaires.