I think I spent half the night trying to get these formatted. I downloaded about fifteen of them from Internet Archives (once I remembered the name of it and found it), then pared it down to eight and tried to post them. They sort of played - actually, they DID play just fine, but there were no thumbnails, just blanks. This sucked! Certainly no one would ever try to play them. I then posted them all on YouTube, which was fast (relatively) and easy, but for some reason I can't access my own YouTube videos through Blogger, so I was left to scramble around and try to FIND the ones I posted. I had to make up the balance with other people's videos. Never mind. I did find my absolute favorites (the bottom two - the lady's expression is the weirdest thing I have ever seen on TV, and the - well, the milk pail explains itself.
I am having frightening problems with videos just conking and not playing. Windows Media Player is pretty much kaput, so my son installed (in about five seconds) something called VLC Media Player. I THINK it works, and if it doesn't, it's because of the limitations of this primitive Blogger site. I have a headache, I haven't slept, and I want this to be a good day, but it doesn't want to be, it really doesn't.
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.
