TFTP Will Return After These Messages: Three Commercials from 1955

Posted to Internet Archive by user 'HappySwordsman' (top), 'Seto-Kaiba_Is_Stupid' (middle), 'HappySwordsman' (bottom)
Length - 0:59 (top), 1:22 (middle), 1:31 (bottom)

Every Wednesday, TFTP takes a break from regular programming to bring you a selection of classic commercials. We will return after these messages...

Here's a group of three commercials from the year 1955, a period when commercials were still fairly lengthy (the three here range from a minute to a minute-and-a-half in duration) and programs were generally sponsored by a single product (which is what allowed for the greater length).

The first commercial above is for Palmolive soap, and it utilizes a tactic that is still familiar to us today: demonstrating how using anything other than the product being advertised will produce an inferior result. The second commercial, for DeSoto/Plymouth autos, uses a mix of animated and live-action footage to help sell cars; animation was everywhere in ads of the Fifties, and it is put to effective use here. The third and final commercial is for Old Gold Filter Kings cigarettes, and it offers a lengthy testimonial to the use of filters (which were then still a novelty) using a fairly hackneyed marriage metaphor.

Christmas at TFTP (Monochrome Monday Edition): "The Lawrence Welk Show" from ABC (Dec. 24, 1958)

Posted to YouTube by user 'John Smith'
Length - 59:29

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

"The Lawrence Welk Show" has been a TV mainstay for many decades--for the last thirty years on public television, during the 1970s in syndication, and from 1955-1971 (including at the time of this 1958 Christmas Eve episode) in prime-time on ABC. During the 1958-59 season, when the program aired from 7:30-8:30 pm on Wednesday nights, it was officially called "Lawrence Welk's Plymouth Show"; Plymouth branding is visible on the curtain behind the orchestra throughout the episode, and a very short Plymouth ad appears midway through.

Welk, whose big-band orchestra conducting cred went back to the 1930s, gained a reputation for presenting what was called "champagne music", or music that was insubstantial but enjoyable. Much of the music on his programs can seem impenetrable now (and certainly not enjoyable), but in his heyday of the late-1950s through the early-1970s there were few impresarios more popular.

The music in this episode, all of it Christmas themed, is much more accessible--if only because most of the songs remain familiar today. Among the Xmas tunes packed into this episode are an instrumental rendition of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" (which opens the episode), "O Holy Night" by the Lennon Sisters (who were one of the most popular parts of Welk's "musical family"), a harp performance of "Winter Wonderland" by Betsy Mills, an instrumental "Jingle Bells" on trumpet and clarinet, "Silent Night" by a choir of Welk regulars, and a second, show-closing performance of "Jingle Bells" sung by all of the Welk show musicians and singers along with their children.