the internet is my time machine

Do you remember this?

The old Tootsie Pop commercial was one of my favorites from the after-school nicktunes days. It's been on the air since 1970, which would make it the longest running commercial in American television history. There seems to be some controversy over this fact actually. According to Guinness, the "Thank You" commercial for Discount Tire Company, is the longest running commercial in tv history, first broadcast in 1975. Maybe the Tootsie pop commercial doesn't qualify because it no longer airs in its original format (the original is 60-seconds long but we are most familiar with the 30-second and 15-second versions).

Record setting or not, the tootsie pop commercial is great because it challenges our childhood paradigms of knowledge. The boy wants an objective answer to the question, "how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?" And the owl, in a brilliant retort, responds by seizing the tootsie pop and biting it on the the third "lick," showing all of us kids that adults make their own rules and that there are no answers out there, although I would not have explained it this way at the time. On another level, the commercial masterfully achieves its advertising objective, to sell tootsie pops, because in our blind and furious quest to defeat the owl, we will buy many many tootsie pops and count the number of licks and we will find an answer goddamnit. People in the cybersphere seem to think the number is something like 9000?

Also, you gotta love the hand-drawn animation!