Monday, April 6, 2020

If you're a celebrity, an infomercial gig might be a sign your career is over.....

Infomercials used to be pretty simple, throwaway programming filling empty air space either overnight or during the day, when a local station needed something to fill time and had no network programming to fall back on.

For the most part, the only infomercials that interest me involve either old television shows (i.e. The Ed Sullivan Show, The Carol Burnett Show, The Midnight Special) or music in general.

Time-Life's formula for an infomercial to hawk their music collections is pretty basic. It used to be you'd get an aged music icon of the past, pair him/her up with either a radio personality, a journalist, or, in a few cases, you'd get one hosted by a former MTV VJ (i.e. Mark Goodman, Martha Quinn).

I was hoping to find one of the ones Martha did, either with fellow MTV alum Alan Hunter, which is pretty recent, or the late Davy Jones, but, nope. Not tonight.

Instead, we serve up a dose of a gone to seed ex-Sha Na Na frontman-turned-VJ/game show host, Jon "Bowzer" Bauman, who's gone back to the grease, but could use some Slim-Fast.



Yes, Bowzer's still on the nostalgia circuit, or will be once we're done with COVID-19. Dude needs to go back to the gym. Yesterday.

No comments: