So this one isn’t unidentified, but it seems worth doing a UWTV entry for anyway, since it was for a long time unidentified – and though it’s now been found, there exists at least one other advert in the same series which we’d love to get hold of.
For many years I was well and truly perplexed by a weird series of adverts I had seen on TV around the mid-80s. Being only about 4 or 5 at the time I couldn’t remember a great deal about them or what they had been for, but my recollection of them had me totally lost as to what they might have been for, and completely confused the hell out of anyone I asked about them. I spent over a decade searching for these adverts on various TV forums online, and this was my description of them:
“I remember a series of particularly dark and weird adverts that showed on TV for a while in the mid-80s (circa 85-86). Each of these commercials featured a pitch black screen and there would be the sound of mumbling, echoed voices and whispers as well as random things/people appearing on the screen and changing or transforming in some way… I remember a man in a shirt changing into a werewolf-like creature – if I remember correctly he appeared as the werewolf first then as himself, then later in the same advert there was the sound of a scared little girl’s voice and a man’s voice answering “Oh, sorry Laura”… Another of these adverts began with a little boy pulsating with some kind of energy, then an old woman came over to him and touched him, and immediately after touching him she turned into stone… I haven’t the faintest clue what they were advertizing…“
Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, wherever I asked about the above, I was met with responses of “Where do you buy your weed”, “Don’t eat cheese before bedtime”, “What the hell are you smoking”, etc etc… and no one ever had any idea what these commercials might have been for. After a decade of searching, I had pretty much given up hope of ever finding these, thought I may as well make a post about them here just for a laugh, but didn’t expect to ever identify or find them.
Then, one day in June 2021 I was just browsing 80s ad breaks on YouTube, and was absolutely gobsmacked to come across one featuring the very advert I’d been looking for…
Completely at random, I had stumbled across the exact advert I had looked for for so long, well after I’d given up hope of actually finding it. I was so taken aback at finding it out of the blue, that I had to lie down for about 15 minutes after watching it, to process it all! And it turned out to be for TDK Video Tapes, something I would never have suspected… and with this video having been uploaded way back in 2008, it turned out it had been online the whole time I’d been looking. I’d probably even skimmed past it on YouTube searches in the past – just goes to show, we should never give up hope of finding these weird TV memories of ours, they can pop up in the most random and unlikely places.
Watching the advert and reading my description above, it’s perhaps easy to see why my memory didn’t jog anyone else’s recollections of this advert. It wasn’t exactly an accurate description, and while the advert is definitely weird, it’s clear that my toddler mind actually twisted it to make it seem even weirder and darker than it was, into something more like some experimental short arthouse film than a light-hearted TV commercial. And this is pretty much the case with the majority of my childhood memories of weird TV; however weird or dark the actual production, it is never quite as disturbing or twisted as my young mind’s recollection – something about a child’s naivete, selective memory and lack of solid understanding of the adult world is capable of twisting things to make them seem even more messed-up and surreal than they actually are.
Nonetheless, this particular advert is definitely a solid example of 80s commercial directors getting creative with arthouse weirdness, and deserves a firm place in the archives of The Haunted Generation.
And another reason for this blog post is, that there is at least one more advert in the same series…
As you can see in my description above, I recall another advert in the series that had “a little boy pulsating with some kind of energy, then an old woman came over to him and touched him, and immediately after touching him she turned into stone…“
I can still very much recall this other ad in the series. I can recall the little boy, seemingly pulsating with energy, or being bathed in white light, in a similar manner to the bloke at 0:09, and from recollection, an old lady entered the frame, said something and touched him, and she immediately turned, slowly, into a stone statue.
There may have been other ads in the series too, but there was definitely at least one more besides the main one… if you have any recollection of the aforementioned missing TDK advert in this series, or any others, please comment below or send us an email!
Unidentified Weird TV 