Ridiculous Infomercial Review Blog

For fans of cheesy advertising, the original TV commercial for Cash4Gold.com will be a hallmark of the year 2008. The Cash 4 Gold ad is one of those things that subtly creeps into your consciousness. The first time you see the commercial you probably don’t even notice it. But the more you see it the more you get annoyed by it—especially since the Cash4Gold.com spot is one of the most heavily run TV commercials of the year. For those few who haven’t yet seen it, behold the classic Cash4Gold ad:

I’ve written about the Cash4Gold.com commercial before. The testimonials are the most interesting and annoying parts of this commercial. The obnoxious old lady on the golf course shouts her lines and looks eager to get to the early bird buffet. But after seeing this testimonial a few dozen times, you realize that this person may not be a woman at all but an elderly transsexual. The other notable testimonial comes from the dark-haired lady with a heavy New Jersey accent who gleefully tells us how she sold her diamond wedding band. Any woman who brags about the money she got from her “first marriage” is going to come across as a gold-digging bitch.

Ridiculous Infomercial Review reader Kyle Varnell emailed me about a brand new Cash4Gold commercial. After nearly a year of seeing the classic commercial on the airwaves, I am very sorry to report that that the new ad does not include either the old tranny or the New Jersey gold-digger:

None of the people who appear on this new commercial are anywhere nearly as interesting or annoying as the testimonials in the previous one. It’s the end of an era.

But at least Cash4Gold kept that hokey and repetitive background music.

You may have seen the TV commercial for the Snuggie “Blanket with Sleeves” that makes you look like you’ve just taken vows of poverty and chastity. But, as many readers pointed out in my last post, the Snuggie is actually a rip-off of an earlier product called the “Slanket.”

The Slanket was created by Gary Clegg in 1998 when he was a freshman in college. The following clip shows Clegg promoting the Slanket on QVC.

(The above video was from a Style network show called The Dish, which is a lame rip-off of The Soup. My apologies.)

Maybe it is just me but looking at Gary Clegg and hearing his story puts me in mind of granola and Burning Man and bong water. On his website he wrote:

Besides creating a product to make people comfortable and warm, our life goals are not to accumulate mansions, SUV’s, expensive watches and closets just for shoes. What we want in life is to travel the world and experience all its cultures while representing humanity positively. Whether surfing in Costa Rica, snowboarding in Austria, or studying language in South America and China, we love to spread our sleeves and let them flap in the wind, giving back in the process.

So it is no wonder the Snuggie marketing department is kicking his ass!

In contrast, when I look at the Snuggie marketing efforts, I get the impression that their target customer is a Midwestern mom reading Parade magazine in the stands at her kid’s soccer game before she hurries home to cook a tuna-noodle casserole.

If you take a look at both the Slanket and the Snuggie one difference that stands out is that the Slanket actually looks like a big blanket whereas the Snuggie makes you look like you are returning from the evening vespers at your monestary—or that you have just been brainwashed into joining an apocalyptic cult.

The Slanket, however, still gives the people wearing it a strange appearance. Slanket hides your body and turns you into an amorphous blob, much like a cheap ghost costume where you just put a sheet over yourself. But this is freakier because a human head is popping out of it. Maybe the impression given is just that of a severed human head and hands. Or maybe some kind of rejected Sid & Marty Krofft character.

On the plus side, all the promotional photos of the Slanket show the people wearing it to be either sitting or recumbent on a couch. Unlike the folks at Snuggie, they never encourage people to take their lives in their hands by wearing this thing in pubic.

I’ve uploaded a new video clip from the Richard Simmons: Farewell to Fat infomercial. After sweatin’ up a storm, fitness and diet guru Richard Simmons meets some overweight emotionally-distraught woman at a mall. He makes an earnest promise to ‘help’ her lose weight but doesen’t even bother to get her phone number—so has to unleash a big campaign to find her so she can tape a testimonial for his latest exercise videos.

Read my review of the entire Richard Simmons Farewell to Fat Infomercial.

Ridiculous Infomercial Review fan Sharon Haughey sent me an email about a commercial for a product called DramaTel. Billing itself as “The Almost Illegal Phone Card,” DramaTel allows a caller appear to be calling from another phone number so as to fool the recipient.

When I first saw the video of the DramaTel commercial, I was convinced it had to be some kind of a YouTube parody, but the website at www.DramaTel.com shows that this is indeed a real advertisement for a real product. Take a look for yourself:

What a perfect idea for the Jerry Springer and Maury Povich audience! The folks at DramaTel would make a bundle if they would advertise their phone card on those talk shows and then offer a paternity testing kit as a free bonus.

Not since the old Myotron infomercial have I seen a TV advertisement featuring such a cheap and hokey dramatization. This commercial really deserves to be called ghetto—in every sense of that word.

One part that doesn’t seem quite realistic comes at the beginning when the woman calls the playa and his phone identifies her as “Baby’s Momma.” How is that ID supposed to help him? It doesn’t tell him which Baby’s Momma is calling him. His caller ID should have said something like “Baby’s Momma #8” so he could know which one is calling.

That “voice changer” feature lets you disguise your voice as a male or female. The DramaTel commercial gives a brief example of the male voice. But unless the person you are trying to imitate sounds like Satan on a heavy metal record spinning backwards I’m not sure how useful this feature really will be.

There are a few shots shown here—such a the playa poolside and the white guy named “John Smith” befuddled by phone records—that offer hope that more ads or even a full-length infomercial will be coming forth from DramaTel. The commercial tells us that DramaTel can also help you “be a cheater.” I would love to see an ad where some man uses DramaTel to keep his playa hand strong.

I love the reaction when the cheater finds out he really isn’t talking to T-Money but to his Baby’s Momma:

The line “You been DramaTeled, playa!” is classic and deserves to be as famous as “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” I fully expect “dramatel” to be featured as a verb in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Everyone knows that campaign 2008 saw a major party presidential candidate make himself into an infomercial star by buying time to air a TV infomercial simultaneously on several networks.

But in addition to a presidential candidate who made himself into an infomercial pitchman, did you know that there was an infomercial pitchman who made himself into a candidate for Vice President of the United States?

The Libertarian Party nominated former congressman Bob Barr for president, and for the office of vice president, Wayne Allyn Root.

By profession, Wayne Allyn Root is a sports handicapper who runs the website WinningEdge.com. To promote his website, Mr. Root regularly appears on TV infomercials. I wrote about Wayne Allyn Root’s commercial in the post Winning Edge and the Return of the Sports Handicapping Infomercial. Root’s infomercial tries hard to disguise itself as a legitimate sports talk show and is much more sophisticated than earlier infomercials touting sports handicapping services. You can see Wayne Allyn Root in the following clip from his infomercial:

And here is a video of Wayne Allyn Root campaigning for high office:

You can see more of Wayne Allyn Root’s valiant campaign efforts at his website RootForAmerica.com. (It’s a play on words. Get it?)

I don’t know how many votes the Barr-Root ticket received, but I think that other candidate with a TV infomercial did a little bit better.