Friday, July 06, 2007

Fizzy, fuzzy, big & buzzy

Wile away your summer afternoons playing a little Alka-Seltzer tag.

  1. Drill a small hole through the center of an Alka-Seltzer tablet
  2. Thread a string through the hole. Make sure the string is long enough to tie around a person's neck so the Alka-Seltzer can be worn as a necklace.
  3. Have lots and lots and lots of water.
As you start chucking water at your opponents, the Alka-Seltzer will react with the water and start foaming away, slowly dissolving, finally falling off the string. Last person with an Alka-Seltzer necklace wins.



Instructables presents How to make carbonated fruit. You're going to be working with dry ice and plastic containers under pressure here, kids. Follow all appropriate safety precautions, i.e., don't be a dumbass.




September 6, 1984 - Letterman dons the Alka-Seltzer Suit




Dig this if you will, man... "The Candy Man" extols the virtues of the ole' Plop, plop, fizz, fizz.



Apparently Alka-Seltzer felt their original "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz/ Oh what a relief it is..." jingle needed some updating (listen to the original jingle), putting on some sort of American Idolesque Battle of the Bands to see who could come up with the best updated jingle. The best corporate whore winner turned out to be someone named Josh Anderson, whose effort is likely to one day take its rightful place in the pantheon of Rock. Or Country. Or Commercial Shill Pop, or whatever the heck this guy is categorized under.

You can view the video of him performing his jingle *ahem* "live" in front of a creepy audience of Twenty-something hipsters. Not creepy because they're Twenty-something hipsters, but creepy because they are all sporting glass of fizzing Alka-Water (perhaps made from leftover bongwater, I am not sure). Glass containers? At a concert event? Glass? I think not. Generally concert venues are a bit hesitant to arm their audience with missiles capable of shattering against the performer's ginormous, Cro-Magnon-looking dome.


Looking past the glass thing, it's really unsettling the way everyone is standing there all glassy-eyed and doubtless working under a serious carbon dioxide buzz, looking like a pack of Stepford Kids.

And, come on... Is this your chief demographic, Alka-Seltzer? The 23-to-28 year old crowd? Really?? These people are not your bread and butter, Seltz... These kids can binge drink Irish Car Bombs until 4:30am, sleep 'til 3 the next afternoon (it's cool 'cause their boss at the CD store was out getting hammered with them) and shrug it off with a couple of Red Bulls.

No, Alky, this... this is your target audience:


The "I Can't Believe I Ate The Whole Thing" Guy! You hit the nail on the head when you ran this 70's campaign... Guys who have had a few extra decades of abusing their digestive tract and are now paying the price for their gastric indiscretions, not these babies with their bulletproof bellies.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.....

what's a battle???!?

Janet said...

Good grief! Effective in that listening to just the first 20 seconds gave me indigestion. Talk about the commercial creating the need for the product. Now there's some waggin' the dog.

Anonymous said...

wagging the dog??!? That's unpossible!