I love Pream ads more than life itself, because they're so odd. (For those who are less than 100 years old, Pream was the first powdered coffee creamer, and it was made of milk solids, which is why it ultimately failed. The damn stuff just didn't dissolve in coffee and turned to sludge at the bottom.) Oddest of the odd is this lady with her weird facial expressions, which lent themselves to manipulation through screenshots. I was surprised to see how easily I could completely change the look on her face, from puzzlement to near-paranoia. She obviously has her doubts about that Pream.
This blog is quite gif-heavy, but probably you've noticed that. If they work all the time, your computer is better than mine. I keep trying to cut back. It's just that I find so many sublime images in early TV advertising. Once the ad execs had broken out of the prison of "radio with pictures", it was full-on seduction.
This lady, I've seen her before somewhere, and it looks to me as if they slipped a little something into her coffee before filming this. Back when I could make gifs in slow motion (Gifsforum, come back to me!), this one reeeeaaaaaallllly looked strange.
Only in cigarette ads do you see this kind of bliss. In fact, coffee and cigarettes usually go together in these things. I just saw one depicting a man and his wife smoking at the breakfast table. The announcer intoned, "Ahhhhhh, the first cigarette of the day!"
1950s ads had a certain kind of zany, almost surreal animation in them. This one has just a tinch of Georges Melies in it, a celestial quality. The zooming-in-to-your-face quality of early TV advertising is very much in evidence here. Things had to explode on the screen to get your attention.
I think this is simply beautiful! Maxwell House had some of the most innovative ads, especially the early ones before the celebrities took over. The plain white oval coffee cup was their trademark, but panning down the row of gleaming, steaming, brimming cups is a stroke of genius.
But that's not what this post is all about. It's a Compare and Contrast. This is from a Maxwell House ad trying to convince the consumer that Instant Maxwell House tastes just as good as "perked" coffee. (And if you remember that stuff, you should get a lobotomy to forget it.)
These two are for Pream coffee creamer. There were dozens of Pream ads, and I've giffed a lot of them simply because I love them so. But this one - I can't really comment, except to say ad execs back then must have thought it was perfectly innocent. Do we have dirtier minds now? I just don't know.
Spurting coffee is one thing. Even spurting coffee splashing out at you and hitting the glass and running and bubbling its way down. But spurts of Pream in a bucket are just too explicit. If this is meant to represent someone milking a cow, then it goes against the laws of gravity! A cow's udder spurts milk, all right, but unless the teat is twisted around backwards (poor cow!), the milk goes DOWN, not sideways. The second image is, in some ways, worse. It just begs for certain questions: why is an elephant like a Seiko watch? Oh, I won't answer that one, but it has something to do with coming in quartz.
You already know I have a great fondness for Pream commercials. I've devoted entire posts to the product. Somehow-or-other, mysteriously, it was discontinued some time in the 1960s. Somewhere on the internet I read that it didn't dissolve properly, and if it truly had milk solids and butterfat from cream in it, it would eventually go bad.
But this commercial, and the following two gifs made from it, are from Pream's glory days. This transcends even the sublime "Pream or Cream?" ads that went on for ten or fifteen years.
Now you tell me. Can a cow's udder do something like this? What about gravity - isn't the milk supposed to go down, not sideways? And how did that pail get so full? I'd offer multiple choice answers, but. . . no, I don't think so.
POST-POST OBSERVATIONS. It was frustratingly difficult to find any information on the demise of Pream. After all, the stuff was around for nearly two decades, then suddenly pulled from the market, never to return.
I found something listed on Amazon - one of those books you can pretty much read in its entirety on the site, so who'd buy it? - called Better Than Homemade: Amazing Foods that Changed the Way We Eat by Carolyn Wyman. Just by the title, you know she's pro-amazing, anti-natural, and in favour of the New and Improved.
The book had a little bit about Pream, and a lot about its successor. "The first powdered creamer to hit supermarkets in 1952 was called Pream. It was made of dehydrated cream, milk sugar, and nonfat milk solids. In other words, it was the real deal. But the processing required to dry it made it taste terrible. And the proteins in the milk made the product spill out in unsightly clumps."
Most of the entry is about Coffee Mate, the one that Changed the Way We Drink Coffee. It was touted as an "amazing discovery" that "eliminates the stale cooked taste of old-fashioned powdered creamers."
"Stale" and "old-fashioned" were the inverse of New, Improved, and Amazing. It's hard to believe Pream tasted THAT bad, implying that all those hundreds of ads where hubby or wifey couldn't tell if it was "Pream or Cream" were lying. I have read on other sites that the product wouldn't dissolve easily (not a problem with the filtered crank-case oil that is Coffee Mate) and left a film floating on the top. It's hard to believe that a product made of milk solids wouldn't eventually go bad or at least become stale-tasting. Coffee Mate is so processed that you can't really tell what it is, a desirable state for the manufacturers. After a while, real cream is an offense to you. You simply don't want something out of a cow's udder any more.
