MISC: My First Commercial

Back in the last century, even before I did a couple of commercials while in the radio biz, I did my first commercial while at Bramalea Secondary School. It was a combination of two well-known things, the Surfaris's hit song Wipe Out as the musical background and a riff on Mission Impossible's opening sequence. It went something like this:

Opening bars, complete with maniacal laugh and somebody screaming 'Wipe out!' "This is called Operation Wipe-Out. Your mission, should you accept it, and you will, is to clean up the garbage in the halls and fill the containers. This message will self-destruct in ten seconds."

Okay, it wasn't great. And it probably meant I shouldn't have wasted any time later in life with dallying in advertising. But it was fun to produce and it got a laugh at school (and not much action).

I mention this because I stumbled upon the Surfaris version of it on YouTube while looking for the special politicians' New Rules video mentioned in the last post. I won't reveal just HOW I got from searching for that to the Surfaris, but I got there nonetheless. Here's just ONE of the renditions at YouTube for the song.

It wasn't until years after I got out of school that I realized that this song is NOT the holder of the unique distinction of being the non-instrumental song with the fewest words in the song. It has either one, two, three or seven words in the song, depending on whether you spell the title as Wipeout or Wipe Out and whether you think the laugh has one word (hah) or five words (hah hah hah hah hah). I always came down on the side of one word.

But the song itself, which is covered by the Ventures in another YouTube video, really IS just an instrumental, with the Surfaris adding the word(s) to the opeinng beats.

If you haven't heard it before or not for a long time, it's worth checking out.