12 Days of Watching (2024) #1: NYC Christmas commercials

One of my favorite YouTube accounts is run by Hugo Faces, who posts a lot of great clips from the New York City stations I watched as a kid. Here is a recent compilation of several holiday-themed commercials, and I think it's a solid warmup for 12 Days of Watching:

Included here: Several ads for Arthur's, a chain I don't recall even hearing about. There certainly weren't any locations in my area. While watching this clip, Laurie declared no one wanted a vacuum cleaner for Christmas, so that's one thing I can remove from my shopping cart!

Consumers Catalog is another unfamiliar concept, but I did have Service Merchandise. What is this guy doing in that ad for the latter? "Oh, how did you guess?" "Well, it wasn't easy considering you insisted on playing charades instead of just telling me what you wanted."

And of course any video of NYC 1980s ads is enriched by a Crazy Eddie spot!