The highest camp of all

Even before the Internet we had annoying catchphrases injected into our daily conversation by advertisers. The Massengill douche commercials of the 1980s were masterworks of shameless campiness, at once implausible, ridiculous, and full of emotional weight. The "not-so-fresh" catchphrase caught on massively, with everyone discussing the commercial, and most importantly, repeating it. Again. And again.

The settings for these commercials are some waspy paradise like Montauk or Kennebunkport: one is invited to imagine a young Jacqueline Bouvier talking to her mother, receiving the feminine wisdom passed down, woman to woman, generation to generation. The sailboat, the American flag, the beach at sunset, comfy sweaters: the goal is visual distraction from the subject matter. An earlier commercial in the same vein doesn't have a catchphrase, but is altogether more heartwarming and cuddly.

Advertisers love to use the "introduction to the mysteries by the wise parent" trope: although (and perhaps because) it basically never happens. These are the types of conversations that parents never want to have (but guiltily feel they should) and children never want to have (but later feel they should have had); the male equivalent is the father-teaches-son-to-shave commercial. In reality, we all figure this stuff out alone (guided by television), so using a television commercial to pretend otherwise is fiendishly manipulative.

This last example predates the other two, with no focus on any "natural" qualities: instead it stresses "Effectal", a magical substance with close ideological (if not chemical) ties to Retsyn. This a more typical example of a Madison Avenue "two Cs in a K", with the actors mouthing the stilted advertising messages created by marketing interns. It shows none of the genius of the above commercials, but the stop-action daisy invasion is beautiful. My favourite detail is where they toast the efficacy of the product by almost touching the bottle to the box.