I have a little secret to share with you: I used to be a librarian. Shhhh! One of the sad facts for a bibliophile like me is that books seem to be slowly disappearing. Kindles, eReaders, e-books, and more are taking the place of actual, physical, paper and ink books. This is especially true when it comes to encyclopedia sets. Huge, multivolume sets have been replaced by online versions. Remember plagiarizing World Book for all of your grade school reports? Now copying the encyclopedia...
Virtually everyone I know is looking for an easy way to lose weight and burn fat--without diet, without exercise, and without effort. For years, gimmicks have been around trying to convince people of the next weight loss breakthrough. In 1984, that “miracle pill” was Grapefruit 45, a supposed weight-loss pill with the fat-burning power of grapefruit. Get a load of this wooden acting:
Now, the seen on tv marketers of Grapefruit 45 at least try to inject some honesty into...
Today’s Way Back Wednesday goes way, way back--all the way to 1979. Ron Popeil, the founder of Ronco, has been bringing his as seen on tv products to the airwaves for forty years. With classic infomercial products such as 6 Star Knives and the Pocket Fisherman, Ronco has become a staple in as seen on tv inventions.
One of the early Ronco products was Mr. Microphone, and its infomercial has to be my favorite yet. Some of the Way Back Wednesday videos are pretty funny, but this one actually...
Posted by Nicci | Posted in Tools, Way Back Wednesday | Posted on 04-08-2010
0
Some of us here at SeenOnTV Express are quite handy (not me). In fact, one of us (not me) is a terrific carpenter and can build actual furniture--furniture that stands up straight and everything.
(Note: I made a cookbook shelf in shop class in seventh grade. For some reason, my mother never hung it on the wall with cookbooks proudly displayed. I can’t imagine why not.)
Today’s Way Back Wednesday retro infomercial product looks like it actually worked pretty well. I’ll...
Have you ever stood in front of your closet, eyeing your wardrobe with dismay because you simply have nothing to wear? Have you ever thought your clothes were just too drab, too plain, too boring? Well, then Way Back Wednesday has a solution for you! If you suffer from a shortage of blinginess, then jump into the Seen On TV Express Time Machine, and travel with us back to the 1980′s, when hair was big and sweatshirts were sparkly.
That’s right--this week, we’re talking about...
Posted by Nicci | Posted in Way Back Wednesday | Posted on 21-07-2010
2
I’ll admit that I’m pretty much a klutz, and if there is a way to mess something up, I’ll find it and expand on it, creating a glorious fiasco of the simplest task. However, even I can manage to accomplish many of the tasks deemed so completely difficult and virtually impossible by television infomercials. The marketing of many seen on TV products relies heavily on the concept of making a difficult task easy. After all, who knew a traditional blanket was such an unwieldy contraption...
Posted by Nicci | Posted in Beauty, Way Back Wednesday | Posted on 14-07-2010
1
Last week, we at SeenOnTV Express reminisced about the perplexing little contraption known as the FlowBee: half vacuum, half haircutting device, and 100% confusion. However, the FlowBee is not the only infomercial product designed to style your hair in the most mystifying of ways. Today we look at another bizarre product designed to give you the hair you have always dreamed of--if, that is, you have always dreamed of spray painting your head.
GLH (which stands for “Good Looking Hair,”...
This week’s post was inspired by my flat iron. Whenever I leave the salon, my hair is smooth and shiny, but when I try to duplicate the results at home, my hair snags on the straightener and just looks fuzzy. I’ve decided that I need to get a new straightener, and I’m trying to decide between the InStyler and the Paris Hilton Celebrity Styler. Mulling my possibilities, I started to think about hairdos of the past, when I wanted anything but straight hair. Frizzy perms,...
While this doesn’t go “Way Back,” we here at Seen On TV Express would be remiss if we failed to acknowledge the first anniversary of the death of Billy Mays, one of the leading pitchmen for infomercials and as seen on TV products. Monday, June 28, 2010, marked one year since the passing of arguably the best television pitchman of this generation.
Billy Mays is perhaps best known for promoting Orange Glo International’s line of cleaning products, which includes Orange Glo,...
With an impending trip to the lake this weekend, it has just hit me that I will be forced to wear a bathing suit--in public--in less than a week. Of course, this just sets my mind to wondering exactly how many calories I can burn in the next two days. I think I may have to resort to forcing my fellow vacationers to wear blindfolds.
In the meantime, all of the trauma brought on by the prospect of wearing a small piece of spandex to cover my not-so-small body has made me begin to ponder the evolution...
