Thursday, August 23, 2018

Advertising For Dummies: "The Odd Couple" reunite to shill for Eagle Snacks (1986)

Eagle Snacks are still around, now owned by something called River West Brands, which also acquired Brim coffee from General Foods several years back before all those mergers. Eagle was originally a non-beverage brand produced by Anheuser-Busch, which sold the brand to Procter & Gamble 22 years ago. P & G subsequently moved Eagle to its current home.

When Eagle was introduced, Anheuser-Busch reunited the stars of TV's original Odd Couple, Jack Klugman (at the time starring on Quincy, M. E.) & Tony Randall, for what amounts to a variant on an old vaudeville routine......!

Edit, 2/26/21: Have to change the video. Here, they're doing the ol' hidden camera ream.



River West is working on rebooting the Eagle brand, so look for it to resurface at your favorite supermarket sooner rather than later.
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4 comments:

  1. Mike DoranAugust 25, 2018

    Fun Fact:

    Tony Randall was starting up his pet project, the National Actors Theater.
    He needed a lot of seed money to put the project together, and asked Jack Klugman to help out.
    Klugman had been doing commercials for quite some time, and told Randall that a few well-placed spots could pay off in steady residuals for years at a time.
    Randall was sold, and he and Klugman sold themselves to Eagle Snacks as a comedy team; they wound up doing the spots for years.
    After Klugman lost his speech temporarily to cancer, he played a silent straightman to Randall on the Eagle spots for several more years.

    So Tony Randall got his theater, Jack Klugman got racetrack money, and all was well.

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  2. hobbyfanAugust 25, 2018

    I've found a variation on this video on YouTube that marks this as from 1986. Would that be about right, Mike?

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  3. magicdogAugust 25, 2018

    Sounds about right. I remember seeing these commercials in HS.

    ReplyDelete
  4. hobbyfanAugust 25, 2018

    Thank you. I will update the header.

    ReplyDelete