Selling buyers on a jingle

My doctor has me on a medicine that makes me nauseas and gives me acid reflux. I’m counting the days until the prescription is done, but without fail, when the acid reflux comes on, I thik back to the seventies and eighties and the jingle that went “plop, plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!”

I haven’t been able to get the sales pitch out of my head. I’m sure the jingle is drawing some head scratching from younger readers. Others of certain age know that the song, of course, pitched the benefits of Alka Seltzer and the temporary relief of heartburn and acid indigestion. 

I don’t hear many jingles anymore. Of course, I don’t listen to much radio or watch much commercial television. We stream most of our television shows and movies commercial free. The benefits of a modern world.

When dinosaurs ruled the Earth

But commercial jingles used to rule the airwaves. I couldn’t tell you what kind of hot dog my mother brought home from the grocery store, but I would regularly hum Oscar Mayer’s “I Wish I Was an Oscar Mayer Weiner.”  Likewise, I never owned a cat, we were a dog family through and through, but I knew the Meow Mix “Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow” commercial by heart. Finally, I hated my after-school job of making coffee for mom and dad when they came home from work, but I could tell you that the “best part of waking up” was Folgers Coffee.  

At that age, I never wanted to grow up, I wanted to “be a Toys ‘R’ Us kid” forever and when I had a tough day, I wanted to sing out, “Give me a break, give me a break, give me a Kit Kat bar” or I waned to stop at McDonald’s because I knew their jingle claimed, “You deserve a break today.”

And one more

Oh, those were the days.  

Of course, I can’t write about commercial jingles, without writing about a classic: Coca Cola’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony).”  I still have my indigestion and acid reflux, but the idea of a bunch of people from around the world coming together to sing and join hands in perfect harmony, well that actually sounds pretty good!