The Blown Away Guy campaign did boost Maxell's sales as did their Israelites advert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clD6J9OmkJI) and The Skids (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gib916jJW1o), they were up against TDK at the time and to be honest the TDK audio cassettes probably just had it.

Sticking with an Audiophile theme, I was surprised to learn its 50yrs of the Technic's SL 1200!?! https://www.technics.com/global/home/sl1200/50th-anniversary...

In the UK in the early 90's you couldn't get these for love nor money, not A stock, not B stock, not C stock because of the Rave/Acid house culture taking off (along with the de'rigueur Stanton cartridge), which is why this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg) will bring back some massive grins for some people! You know who you are! ;)

The speaker has to be a JBL L100, right?

I had not seen this before, but I have seen many parodies of it which retrospectively make sense.

I found this collection of some of them: https://youtu.be/hmmcgSgt5_c

When i was a kid, we used to call these 'Simpsons moments' referring to the feeling of seeing the parody before the original. As the Simpsons has many cultural references, but is also popular with kids, many of us who grew up watching it had various 'now I get it' moments.

What's interesting is that's it's not obvious that there is a parody or reference at all if one is not familiar. I remember the Simpsons having terminator, 2001, and many other film references that I would have an aha moment years later when i finally understood it.

So, did the makeup guy get paid?

My favorite cosplay of this was when Ryan Dunn dressed up as him and they used a fighter jet to blast him with 200C air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEFx1qmW4ts

I've been looking for this for a long time but couldn't put a good description to it since I saw it as a kid.

So we're doing random blogspam now?

Forget ‘blown away’, get a load of these three guys and Big Jay McNeely: https://i.imgur.com/iUQ6hHO.jpeg

I saw "Blown Away Guy" in the thread title and immediately that image came to mind. It was a very popular dorm room poster when I was in college.

As soon as I saw the title of this post, I knew it was going to be about this ad. So iconic and well done.

Blown-Away Guy may be the most iconic still image, but I'd say the most iconic moving image with sound was the commercial for Memorex cassette tape with Ella Fitzgerald and the "Is it Live, or is it Memorex?" tagline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeeuT3ciqpI It was so popular, there were various sequels.

Maxwell may have won the tape print ad war, but TDK definitely buried this TV ad in my brain in the 80's. (I think the singer is Aussie, so I wonder if this was also a global commercial). https://youtu.be/W_cH8Wi0Ggo

All these years I thought the company name was Maxwell, not Maxell. I can’t be the only one…

The image in the ad is great. But that has to be the worst kerning I've ever seen. It's so bad I'm not even sure it can be considered kerning. Maybe someone just added a few spaces in between "high fidelity" and "tape" for no apparent reason?

As a teenager, I had a modified version of this hanging on my room; someone had added a yawning cat on top of the speaker, and re-captioned it "Tuna Breath."

Back in my day we walked uphill to school both ways in the snow and bought our memes on paper at Spencer's Gifts.

My memories are very fuzzy but I feel like Maxell tapes lived up to the hype and they were better than the usual dreck I had. I’d put my “good stuff” on any Maxell I could find.

Also referenced in the Simpsons: https://tenor.com/view/milhouse-simpsons-tv-blasting-thrillh...

As a Bauhaus fan, reading the article was "Eh? It was Peter Murphy" - and then I found it was a different ad in the UK.

Oh man, the embedded youtube clip of the spot is priceless in the fact that there is an hiss so dominate in the audio just as if I was listening to one of the discussed Maxell tapes! It had me looking for the NR button.

Another contemporary parody I remember is from the comic Bloom County.

https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2009/07/27/

(Don’t be fooled by the url date, that’s just the date gocomics reran it)