Saturday Night Live 90s Commercial Parodies

The 90s may not have been the golden age of Saturday Night Live but it was certainly a consistently funny time for the show, featuring a versatile and talented cast willing to do almost anything for a laugh. True to SNL tradition, the era featured an abundance of parody commercials, spoofs featuring the cast actors that closely resembled and not-so-subtly mocked real television ad spots. So many of these fake commercials were so spot-on that they became indistinguishable from actual commercials. Save for the content matter, that is. I highly doubt "Oops I Crapped My Pants" would sell well on real store shelves, but SNL does an impressive job of making it seem almost plausible.

There were countless fake commercials throughout the years, but the 90s gave us many of our most memorable. If nothing else, this trip down SNL memory line is enough to make you miss Phil Hartman's unique skill at incredibly effective deadpan. Here are just a few of the satirical gems that entertained us between sketches:



Old Glory Insurance

Robot Attack Insurance

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In a time when many celebrities (Alex Trebek, Wilford Brimley) were out there hawking insurance, it was tough not to poke fun at the incredibly somber and humorless tone of their paid spokesperson delivery. This Old Glory bit definitely did the trick, spotlighting the dead-on deadpan intonation of Law & Order's Sam Waterston. He really had me going for awhile. I was almost certain this was a real ad, until they brought on the robots. Waterston, completely straight-faced, announced that killer robots were among the leading causes of death among the elderly. Without his pitch-perfect delivery, this could have been a dud, but Waterston definitely brought it. I was practically at my phone frantically dialing Old Glory for robot protection, and I was only ten. The robots weren't even after me yet.


First Citywide Change Bank


The voice-over confidently proclaims, "When you only do one thing, you do it better." It seems almost like a legitimate tagline for a bank. That one thing, however, was making change. As in changing monetary denominations. The proud and suave bank manager (Jim Downey) asserts, "We have been in this business a long time. With our experience, we're gonna have ideas for change combinations that probably haven't occurred to you. If you have a fifty-dollar bill, we can give you fifty singles. We can give you forty-nine singles and ten dimes. We can give you twenty-five twos. Come talk to us." And so it went, with helpful examples endless recombinations of change. Every aspect from the camera angles to the lighting to the booming voice-over was so similar to the real thing, you'd almost wish they would give you twenty singles, two tens, one five, eight quarters, forty nickels, and a hundred pennies. Wait, is that fifty? You shouldn't count on my skills, I couldn't even get through 8th grade Number Munchers the other day.

Bug-Off


In a time when some pest control agencies were focusing on humane treatment, Bug-Off would definitely have stood out in its approach. As an alternative to the paralyzing poison used by its real-life competitors, Bug-Off tears off the roaches legs, scorches its reproductive organs, beats it to unconsciousness with its own limbs, stuffs cotton in every opening, and torments it with out-of-reach morsels of food. All through a clear viewing window to boot! Now that's a show. It admits that it won't kill the roach, but it will "give him plenty to think about". After all, isn't that what we want from our roach-killers? A thought-provoking experience for our victims. Sold.

Crystal Gravy


During the ongoing cola wars, Pepsi released Crystal Pepsi, a ridiculous attempt to fool people into thinking that clear beverages were purer and less tainted. Never mind that the new product had pretty much the exact same makeup as the original, save for the dark syrupy color. Using the same "Right Now" background music as the original, SNL gave us Crystal Gravy. I know, I know. Ew. It did effectively showcase the stupidity of Crystal Pepsi's premise. Still, though. Gross.


The Love Toilet


Some of these ads weren't necessarily based on real-life products, but were just ridiculous tangential ideas likely thought up by their writers at three in the morning. I imagine the Love Toilet fell into this category. The voice-over asked sexily, "Why not share the most intimate moment of them all?" Again, ew. The Love Toilet was a side-by-side toilet, made for couples to share this, um, special time. It was certainly a novel idea, I'll give you that.


Super Colon Blow


With a rise in health-consciousness, many commercials played to our sense of nutritional superiority. Super Colon Blow did a fine job of mocking cereals like Total, with the voice-over imploring Phil Hartman to guesstimate just how many bowls of his regular cereal he'd need to equal the fiber content of Colon Blow. Correct answer? 30,000 bowls. Yikes. Sorry I'd asked. As for Super Colon Blow? A whopping 2.5 million in fiber exchange rate. Hartman was catapulted skyward on the aforementioned bowls, giving us the visual fright of colon-blasting fiber. Ouch.


Bathroom Monkey


Really, who is more prototypically 90s than Janeane Garofalo? Her stint on SNL may have been brief, but she did give us this memorable commercial. Yes, it's silly, but that's the whole point. It looks like an average cleaning product testimonial ad spot but with one twist: the product in question is actually a monkey. Janeane muses, "Idon't know where monkeys come from.. I don't know how they reproduce.. I don't know how they eat. But I do know one thing: they were born to clean bathrooms." With a smile, she continues, "And when it's cleaning power is all used up.. (throws away used monkey)..simply pick up another in any of three decorative colors: Red..(cut to monkey in red diaper)..Blue..(cut to monkey in blue diaper) ..or Orangutan". The voice-over helpfully intones, "Orangutan will not wear diaper". Sure, it makes no sense, but you've got to admit it's funny. Disturbing, yes, but funny.


Bad Idea Jeans


90s Dockers commercials were enough to drive anyone crazy after a few viewings, so the Bad Idea Jeans parodies absolutely came at an opportune comedic time. Like the Dockers ad, this featured casual conversation between regular men. The difference? I don't think any Dockers ad star would utter, "Now that I have kids, I feel much better having a gun in the house". At least, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't.

Happy Fun Ball


To avoid lawsuits, more and more ads in the 90s were tacking on every imaginable disclaimer. It wasn't quite at today's levels (today an Ambien commercial told me I might experience sleep eating/ driving and more outgoing and aggressive behavior with memory loss and hallucinations) but it was a growing trend. The Happy Fun Ball commercial aptly pokes fun at these ever-increasing warnings. It could cause everything from itching to temporary blindness, and of course if it begins to smoke, you shouldget away immediately, seek shelter and cover your head. Sounds harmless enough, right?

Oops I Crapped My Pants


I do realize these ads are abundant in bathroom humor, but that's probably why we got such a kick out of them as kids. In this spoof of a Depends ad, we see a kindly old couple with their granddaughter. The young girl asks her grandmother to play tennis, but the old woman looks pained and says she needs to "sit this one out". Up until this point, this could be an actual ad. I was pretty convinced until they revealed the product in question to be "Oops I Crapped My Pants". Other than the name, every other element of the ad is pretty much right on point with a real Depends commercial. How can you not laugh at old people saying "Oops, I Crapped My Pants"? That's like saying you didn't laugh when that LifeAlert lady fell and couldn't get up. For shame.


Yes, many of these ads employed shameless tricks and ploys to get us to laugh, but more often than not it seemed to work. In many cases, the parodies were so on target that it became tough to tell whether we were watching the show or the commercial break. No target was too big or small to be the subject of mocking in these short fake ad spots. Whether our interest was in ruthlessly maiming bugs and leaving them to die while watching through a viewing window or safeguarding ourselves from the inevitable onslaught of giant killer robots, Saturday Night Live was there with a laugh.

Saved by the Bell

If we've learned anything from being raised by TV, it should be that continuity errors are a basic part of life. Whenever a location, plot point, or character gets tiresome, simply replace them without explanation or any nod to their past existence. Whether or not these things actually happened is unimportant. The important thing is to never mention them. Ever.

Saved by the Bell was famous for its arrant disregard for continuity, changing settings and weaving in new characters whenever convenient. They simply made them disappear, never to be mentioned again. Bored with your show's bland suburban Indianapolis backdrop? Move to Palisades! Tired of your show's major characters? Replace them with newer, more attractive actors! Two cast members want to leave the show before it runs its course? Replace them and later reintegrate them, never mentioning either their absence or the new best friend you briefly had during their leave. It's pretty much a perfect system.


While other shows may have prided themselves on meticulous attention to detail, Saved by the Bell got away with changing the rules over and over again. It didn't seem to matter much to its frenetic young fan base. For one, the show was marketed toward children, allowing producers to operate under the assumption that kids don't notice when their beloved favorite character is mysteriously sliced out of the picture. More importantly, though, the show was a fantasy. It wasn't meant to be reality. It was meant to entertain and allegedly educate on the importance of partaking in good clean fun, and those aims took precedence over any semblance of sense.

The original incarnation Good Morning Miss Bliss premiered in 1988. Watching this horribly cheesy introduction, it's amazing this even got picked up for one season. The opening is seemingly more focused on the adult characters than our lovable middle school miscreants, and that music is truly terrible in a late 80s slow melodic jams sort of way. It had potential, sure, but it didn't exactly seem poised for great success.

It's also entirely possible there were just too many quirky curly-haired players in the original; we wanted to see some beautiful people, dammit.

So what's a network to do? If your response is to completely change the premise, back stories, location, and characters, then congratulations. You're on your way up on the ruthless cheap-ploy television executive track. Kudos to you. You'll receive your certificate of achievement in 3-5 business days.

NBC repackaged the original show into a new Saturday morning series they called Saved by the Bell. They brought in Tiffani Amber Theissen, Elizabeth Berkley, and Mario Lopez to round out their all-American crew, switched the setting to Palisades, California, and pretended that most of them had been friends since birth.



The show became wildly popular, quickly developing a substantial young following. It didn't seem to matter that critics tore the show apart. Entertainment Weekly described it as "featur[ing] stiff acting, cheap sets, and plots that seem lifted from Happy Days reruns." It didn't seem to help that the show was both morally conscious and outstandingly superficial at the same time. Despite the poor critical receptions, kids ate this up. They adored it. They couldn't get enough.

The show also frequently broke the Fourth Wall, with Zach talking directly into the camera and occasionally and inexplicably relying on the power to freeze the surrounding action. It was cheesy, sure, but Zach was admittedly charming. It's tough to find a girl who grew up in the 90s that never had a flicker of a Zach Morris crush. It was pretty much inevitable.

Our show featured an assortment of two-dimensional characters:


Zach Morris (Mark Paul Gosselaar) is an endearing slacker, a twinkling-eyed schemer always seeking to cheat the system. He's a good kid overall, following the TV trope of lovable mischief maker. He gets himself into his fair share of jams, sure, but he never stretches his rule-breaking so far so as to constitute actual trouble-making. Plus, he had that hair. Have you seen that hair? Sigh.




Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies) is a gossip queen and shopping addict extraordinaire. She comes from a wealthy family (both her parents are doctors) and is constantly getting herself into shopping related jams in between dodging unwanted advances from Screech.



Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley) is a feminist overachiever who is borderline obsessive about her grades. She's somewhat of a do-gooder, but more often she's a prima donna perfectionist with a penchant for caffeine pills. Okay, so that only happened in one episode, but I still see it as major character development. I mean, she was so excited. She was so excited. She was so scared.




Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani-Amber Theissen) Kelly was the All-American good girl, a cheerleader whose good looks win her an outpouring of male attention. She wasn't the smartest girl in the bunch, but she was sweet and we were supposed to feel sorry for her because she was sort of poor.




Albert Clifford "AC" Slater (Mario Lopez) is a tough-talking jock who disparagingly refers to Zach as "Preppy". The two are often rivals but eventually form a solid friendship. Slater is a wrestler and a pretty impressive dancer, though I wouldn't comment on it while he's looking all bad-ass in that bomber jacket. Though Mario Lopez is obviously Mexican, his family is mysteriously not and it's left pretty much unexplained until we get to the college years and they give us some halfhearted explanation for it. Thanks, guys.




Samuel "Screech" Powers (Dustin Diamond) is our well-meaning nerd, a geek who somehow managed to kick it with the cool kids. He has an intense unrequited love for Lisa, feelings that are for obvious reasons not reciprocated. He's generally smart but quirky. It's tough to watch him now and separate Diamond from the tool he's become, but back in the day he used to be pretty endearing.



Mr. Belding (Dennis Haskins) was an oddly meddling principal who played a major role in the daily lives of our main characters. He never seemed to interact with any other students because they were all pretty much part of the scenery, so I'll assume he took a special interest in our heroes and focused his entire career on dealing with their antics and encouraging their potential.


The show played stereotypes way over the top, with dumb rocks-for-brains jocks and pocket-protector sporting nerds at every turn. They also threw in a "message" or two for good measure, reminding us that it's not good to drink and drive or that setting up a secret video-dating service using the school's virtual yearbook equipment is wrong. I know I learned a valuable lesson from that last one. I started all my video dating services out in the open, thank you very much.

Chuck Klosterman describes the last season's odd character swap best when he examines what he calls the "Tori Paradox". All of a sudden Kelly and Jessie have disappeared and no one says a word about their absence. Instead, we get the tomboy, leather jacket-wearing Tori character who mysteriously swoops in and immediately becomes a part of the gang. Just as quickly as she'd appeared, she was gone without a trace and Jessie and Kelly were back as if nothing had happened. No one said anything about it, so we were just supposed to assume everything was fine and we shouldn't question it.

There were later more continuity errors to be had when we rejoined part of the gang for Saved by the Bell: The College Years, but that's a post for another time. NBC further milked the franchise by creating a spin-off Saved by the Bell: The New Class. There was no integrity to it, just pure money making. I mean, honestly, I owned Saved by the Bell Zackberry scented shampoo. Zackberry! You try to tell me that's not squeezing the franchise for all it's worth.

Of course, the big news today is of the purported SBtB reunion, reported in People magazine.



Over the summer, Zach--er, excuse me, Mark Paul, appeared in full Zach Morris garb and gave an in-character interview with Jimmy Fallon, complete with giant cell phone and fourth wall breakage:



Of course, don't expect to see Dustin Diamond in any reunion hype. He recently released a tell-all book alleging the gang was not quite as squeaky-clean as their on-air image. I resent that, of course. I'm almost certain they scrubbed diligently with Zackberry-scented toiletry products.

Don't Tell Them It's Educational....

With the rapid rise in household personal computer ownership throughout the 80s and 90s, children faced an entirely new arena of play to conquer. While kids may have viewed computers as a new uncharted frontier of free play, our parents and teachers were somewhat the wiser in regulating our zeal. Computers, they realized, were a perfect tool for tricking kids into learning material that would only otherwise be absorbed against their will. This backhanded approach to learning may not have been a perfect system, but dammit we would learn our multiplication tables and enjoy it.

Computer game manufacturers released heaps of educational titles cleverly disguised as amusing games. Bright colors and flashy animations effectively distracted children from the realization that they were indeed learning, and in their spare time to boot. Sure, we had an inkling deep down that these games were more substantial than our usual trivial fare, but throw enough Troggles or buffalo hunting into the mix and we were putty in your education-molding hands.

Whether in old-school Macintosh computer labs at school or on our crappy primitive homebound PCs, we collectively spent countless hours playing educational computer games. Parents and educators were usually pretty adept at remaining tight-lipped over the educational nature of the game, leaving us to our delusions of frivolous game play. As far as adults were concerned, what we didn't know couldn't hurt us...and it may just help us pass a geography test along the way.


Oregon Trail



Oregon Trail was the classic 80s and 90s educational computer game. It was a pioneer (this pun may be too horrible even for me) in its field, teaching children everywhere about the Westward bound wagon trains during our love affair with manifest destiny. The game was chock full of kid-friendly elements that easily outweighed our distaste for all things educational. For one, we got to name the characters after ourselves, meaning when our friends died of dysentery along the way we could write mean things on their editable tombstones. We got to pick our professions, make little computer-based lives for ourselves, the whole shebang.

The real appeal though was in the hunting portion of the game. If you weren't naturally sadistic in your youth, Oregon Trail was enough to bring out your inner puppy kicker. Whether you were into the challenge of shooting down a skittering squirrel or you preferred the Native American-decimating cultural significance of killing the snail-paced, monolithic buffalo, the hunting segment had something for everyone. Yes, our wagon could only hold 100 measly pounds of meat and we'd killed a whopping 1430, but we could always hope for one of our wagon-mates to get the measles and clear the space for more sweet, sweet buffalo.

To read the full Oregon Trail post, click here



Math Blaster



The game's producers had actually the audacity to put the word "math" in the title. The jig was up, we knew this was arithmetical. They did, at least, have the minor courtesy to include a video game word like "blaster". Do I get to kill math? Explode times tables in a fiery haze of unbridled and highly potent explosives? I guess I'd just have to play and find out.

It didn't turn out exactly as I hoped, but I did get to be a Blastronaut, which at least won major points in creative wordsmithery. The game itself was a essentially a school math worksheet cleverly disguised as a fast-paced game. Solving math problems earned you valuable ammo in your space blasting quests, which certainly came in handy when firing the lasers.




Storybook Weaver



I should have seen through this one, but I was totally fooled by its veneer of fun and whimsy. Storybook Weaver was not really a game at all, but a means of encouraging children to write and illustrate their own stories on the computer. In short, was an imaginative kid's dream. The possibilities were endless--well, almost endless, as we were limited by the available illustration graphics to augment our woven stories.

The best means of circumventing the educational aspect, of course, was to focus mainly on the illustrating process. With scores of backgrounds, characters, and design elements to choose from, it was like the world's most exciting and interactive sticker book. Even just reminiscing about it makes me yearn to drag and drop some princess images.



Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?



Broderbund released the first Carmen Sandiego games in the mid-80s, launching a vast and imposing educational game franchise. The creators' original aim was to get kids pumped about using the almanac; the first version was even released with a companion almanac included in the sale. How this premise managed to grab the attention of young people is a true testament to the entertaining nature of the game because let's be real here. Almanacs? Really?

The game featured elusive jewel thief Carmen Sandiego, who we were meant to capture and arrest in her globetrotting travels. We could interview bystanders and call CrimeNet, collecting clues and traveling from Kiev to Carolina in hot pursuit of our scarlet-hatted target while avoiding her VILE henchmen. The mystery element was more than enough to make us forget that this was essentially a map study session.



Reader Rabbit



Again, the titular focus on reading was enough to make us suspicious of this one, but it was admittedly pretty fun. The initial version was very simple, focusing on simple letter recognition and sounds, but they quickly released more advanced versions for a wider range of ages. We played some little games to form words, we got to watch some cute little animations with a little song and dance thrown in, everyone won. Unless you couldn't spell. Then you were pretty much screwed.



The Incredible Machine



Puzzle and strategy games were also pretty effective educational tools, particularly if they came in such a kick-ass cool form as The Incredible Machine. Each phase of the game gave us a delightfully eclectic assortment of random objects and charged us with completing a simple task using the implements at hand. I'm telling you, I could spend hours figuring out how to light a candle using a bowling ball and a medium-sized pulley. This game could seriously pull you in, especially when it teased you with the many near-miss solutions where you almost get the water in the bucket but then it spills all over the floor and ignites your electrical cord. Damn.


Living Books

Exactly what it sounds like. These would probably not hold the attention of today's technology-hungry overstimulated children, but they were quite a revelation to those of us who knew books only as a collection of paper pages bound with a spine. I am pretty sure that watching the Living Book version of Stellaluna would still amuse me equally as much as back in my third grade computer lab days.



Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing



Believe it or not, once upon a time typing was not an innate inborn skill we possessed from the tender age of three. While today's kids' fingers may fly over a keyboard, we needed a little guidance in the right direction. I'm not sure who Mavis Beacon is, but she has truly had a profound impact on my life. Are you out there, Mavis? I want to thank you.

Mavis Beacon was not all fun and games, though it was part of it. We had to complete a series of tasks and tedious drills before we got to move on to any of the fun stuff. By fun stuff I mean typing sentences to make a car race or typing number values to represent a grocery store checkout. Come to think of it, that doesn't sound that fun at all. Regardless, it seemed like a pretty worthy endeavor at the time. I even printed out the certificate displayed onscreen when I reached 30 WPM. Now that would be a great display piece for my office.


Number Munchers




Mmmm, numbers. Delicious. Well, at least they were to our Muncher pals, who greedily gobbled them up just as quickly as our nimble little fingers could identify multiples of nine. We did have to contend with those pesky Troggles, the imaginatively designed monsters who stalked the board in hopes of digesting our little green arithmetic-solving agent. If you aptly outsmarted the Troggles and managed to maneuver your way to the next level, you got to watch a little animation depicting your inevitable triumph over the evil Troggle. Good times.

To read the full Number Munchers post, click here


Some people criticize the "make it fun" approach, dismissing it as an ineffective means of teaching. I resent that assertion, though. Sure, while researching Number Munchers for this post I briefly played the free version online and found I don't know what a prime number is, but that's not the point. The point is that I played these games day in and day out without parental intervention. I actually wanted to learn. These games were no substitute for actual classroom-style education, but they were a nice change of pace from drill-and-test. At the end of the day, if we were motivated to begin some supplemental learning unprovoked, everyone was pretty happy.