b.y.o. vaporwave

July 30, 2017 9:17 AM

70 minutes of Japanese TV commercials from 1980-1982.
90 minutes of Japanese TV commercials from 1985.
35 minutes more of Japanese TV commercials from 1985.
40 minutes of Japanese TV commercials from 1987.

Casting the net a little wider...

28 minutes of random Japanese TV commercials from 1953-1988.
34 minutes of Japanese TV food commercials from 1975-1985.
26 minutes of Japanese TV refrigerator commercials from 1975-1985.
61 minutes of Sony product commercials in Japan from 1973-2005.
38 minutes of Japanese TV VCR commercials from 1977-1993.
29 minutes of Japanese TV automobile commercials from 1964-1983.

posted by ardgedee (12 comments total)

enough commercials, back to the program - warning - don't click if you don't like bugs, especially eating bugs
posted by pyramid termite at 10:17 AM on July 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

So many washed up American actors...
posted by NervousVarun at 10:18 AM on July 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Cool tip, if you turn the sound off and put on a W. G. Sebald audiobook it turns into Sans Soleil
posted by theodolite at 10:21 AM on July 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

And a collection of Japanese ads for booze featuring David Bowie
posted by merocet at 10:33 AM on July 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

34 minutes of Japanese TV food commercials from 1975-1985

Don't miss the ad for Creap (six minutes in)!
posted by languagehat at 11:52 AM on July 30, 2017

“Oh, hello, American investor. I see you are interested in distributing Mr. Sparkle in you home prefecture. You have chosen wisely. But please - don't believe me. Observe this commercial.”
posted by Fizz at 12:23 PM on July 30, 2017 [8 favorites]

It's a treat to see the evolution of these commercials as the bubble economy ripens in the mid-1980s, and companies toss money hither and yon. More everything. More one-off shots of exotic scenery in foreign locales; more gaijin actors, like James Coburn, hired for extended campaigns; more slickness in production all around. The ads from liquor companies like Suntory, which are almost dreamlike in their quiet depiction of nature, picked up a lot of awards in competitions.

Also, in the mid-eighties, Sony was everywhere, dominating the TV and VCR equipment markets. Along with a few other companies, they spearheaded consumer technology in home video production. In just a few years, video went from a passive entertainment to something that people could create and edit themselves, using camcorders and VCRs. (The end result of this, of course, is 4K video on smartphones.)
posted by Gordion Knott at 2:13 PM on July 30, 2017

. . . And that beer-pounding actor on the ship at the 8.02 mark in this video is none other than Toshiro Mifune, looking worse for wear as he approaches his later years. Not sure if a booze commercial is an appropriate venue for Mifune, who loved to indulge in his tipple. At this point his movie-making days with Kurosawa are probably long over, after an acrimonious split, and his international stardom was past its peak. He'd still show up in secondary roles in movies, however, always crushing whatever part came his way.
posted by Gordion Knott at 2:33 PM on July 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Wonderful!

When I first got to Japan, and checked in to my hotel, seems like it was hours before I could tear myself away from the TV, because of the commercials. And back home, stateside, I'm cable-free and don't even own a TV (mostly, because of the commercials).
posted by Rash at 4:51 PM on July 30, 2017

When I was teaching college in Taiwan in 1977-78, we all used to crowd into the Japanese Department's TV room so we could watch broadcasts (Taiwanese TV was dreadful). It was like looking into the future; we'd never seen anything like it (except, of course, the Japanese), and the ads were especially amazing.
posted by languagehat at 5:20 PM on July 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

I had expected the title's crack about vaporwave to be somewhere between a half-baked idea and a snark. But no, of course not, vaporwave-Japanese-commercial is (was?) already an actual video genre, if a small one. Example.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:58 PM on July 30, 2017

Smash TVs Memorex is the pretty much the peak of music/TV commercial mashup (even if it skews chillwave rather than vaporwave).
posted by lmfsilva at 5:26 AM on August 1, 2017