Flash and Frazetta--Rooney and Rainier

Comments from readers sent me to YouTube for a quick look at a few of the old Rainier spots, and doing that reminded me of a few things I forgot to include last time:

Regarding Mickey Rooney... The Mick was so popular in general that he appeared in spots for three or four years straight. (He actually talked about himself in the third person, discussing things "Mickey Rooney," the film/television personality, would or wouldn't do!) One ad I had forgotten--because it wasn't particularly memorable--presented Rooney as a crusty old mountain man confronting a gunfighter/gambler in an Old West saloon. (We got to go to Arizona to film that one!)

And the Nelson Eddy spoof actually was shot in two versions--Mick and his wife (who played our Jeanette MacDonald) together sang our parody of "Indian Love Call," at the end of which Mick poured her a beer. The straight version had him pouring into a schooner she held, and we shot that a few times to pick the best takes; the other version had him carelessly pouring the beer down her dress instead. The trick was, we put both versions out for broadcast, having the stations play the straight one most often, then rotate-in the comic one every once in a while. A bit of trickery to keep our viewers confused, amused, and maybe more attentive!

And there were two rather "difficult" spots that I neglected to mention. One that we called "the horizontal pour" showed a small table and chair in a room; but all furniture was fastened to the floor, and the room and camera were mounted on a rotating axis (much like a famous Fred Astaire set that allowed him to dance up the walls and onto the ceiling), so the guy seated at the table could pick his Rainier bottle and beer schooner up from the table and then (as room and camera rotated ninety degrees) pour his beer seemingly sideways into the glass.

Our other engineering challenge was a take-off on TV spots back then that used continuous rows of toppling dominoes which, once started, would go on tipping over sequentially, flowing in some pattern for 30 seconds. We hired an engineering firm to put a slight edge-crimp on about 2600 Rainier bottle caps that we could also stand on edge in rows. These, we hoped, when toppled and sent rippling onward, would create a giant version of the somewhat calligraphic Rainier R.

I was one of the lucky sods who had to place each and every cap painstakingly into position on the 12-foot-wide translucent surface; we "cappers" often wound up lying on our stomachs and reaching down from scaffolding above to line up the ones impossible to place from outside the circle. As I recall, the caps crew put in about 30 man-hours getting set. As a result, we all rather dreaded the actual moment of shooting, because if anything went wrong... yes, 30 more hours to set up for a second take.

We also realized that one leg of the R would have to be tripped separately, halfway through the spot, before the overhead camera zoomed out far enough to show any crew person involved. I was chosen to use the small rake that would start that leg's first row of caps falling, and we rehearsed many times to be sure I had the cue to reach in at the right moment.

Came time to shoot, there was palpable tension around the set. One chance to get it right... or start over. As the music began (we were using a happily upbeat, carefully rewritten parody of Cole Porter's "You're the Top"), a finger toppled the first cap, and the next ones fell, and on they went... and I reached in and pushed the leg row and moved away quickly... and the bottlecaps kept falling, and every damn one of them fell as intended, right to the last one--30 seconds of heavenly bliss for all of us. We leaped and cheered, we hugged and high-fived. We'd gotten it!

We had many pleasant moments (as well as long days) shooting all those television commercials, a dozen years' worth, but this time out I actually had wanted to talk about Rainier's posters. So time to shift gears ("Rrraaaiiii-niieeerrr")... er, topics...

The posters we created usually were meant to support the latest TV spots, basically functioning as souvenir production stills (like the Rooney scene I included with the first Rainier posting below). As such they might be visually arresting, or puzzling, or sometimes just boring. But the designers working at Heckler or hired from outside also fashioned a few posters that were stand-alone items.

Two of those that were vaguely interesting, good enough without being really compelling, were parodies of a National Geographic cover, with the usual yellow frame surrounding a scene of giant bottles, and a supposed Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell (with sports fan seated in front of TV and his pet mountain goat at his side with a sixpack dangling from its neck St.Bernard-like). The Post parody was a good concept, but sadly the illustrator hired couldn't duplicate the style or look of Rockwell.

Two others that did come off have a more complex backstory. As millions of his fans know, Frank Frazetta was a painter whose powerful illustrations for paperback and magazine covers would guarantee sales in the hundreds of thousands--think of all the Tarzan and Conan books of the Seventies, and all the other artists who were paid to create covers that just looked like Frazetta had painted them.

Well, we decided that Rainier should have a Frazetta too, a scene with our Conan-the-Barbeerian hero riding a giant bottle, the two of them confronting a huge Sasquatch. Since I was a comics collector, I was picked to make the contact with Frank and try to get him interested. Working through Russ Cochran (E.C. Comics reprints publisher and quasi-agent for Frazetta), the negotiations began. At first the popular painter expressed interest and indicated a willingness to fit us into his schedule. But some months passed, and suddenly the sales of Frank's own posters were skyrocketing, and he was getting offers from Hollywood (remember the poster for Clint Eastwood's film The Gauntlet?), and our puny advertising job didn't look as interesting or lucrative.

We gave up on Frazetta himself, and I brought my friend William Stout on board instead. Bill was then a Los Angeles-based illustrator and sometime movie designer (these days he has grained renown as a painter of dinosaurs, the flora and fauna of Antarctica, and other natural history subjects), and as a major Frazetta fan himself, he was quite willing to paint our poster image. Bill and Heckler worked out a design, and rough sketches, and then he went to work. The final painting was better, maybe more Frazetta-ish, than I think the boss had anticipated. (And like some of the other posters we did, the brewery sold or gave away all copies rather too quickly, and wouldn't usually reprint.)

(This is the point at which I should demonstrate how well Stout carried out his "Freshetta" assignment, but I can't find my own copy of the poster! Maybe a copy exists on-line somewhere, but I'll just leave that to the computer experts. In its place I've added a piece of Stout art with a vaguely similar concept: hero on beast confronting monster.)

Finally, let's revisit the "Fresh Gordon" science fiction commercial I talked about last time... Heckler planned a poster to accompany that ad too and took some possible photos during the shoot. But Jim Foster and the Rainier people nixed it completely. I was convinced that the brewery was missing a bet, given the great popularity of sci-fi movies and novels; and I persuaded Jim to give me the rights to print and sell the "Fresh Wars" Rainier poster; they'd get all the publicity, and I could make a little money, maybe.

I asked a friend in the comics business (Rod Dyke of Golden Age Collectibles in Seattle's Pike Place Market) to put up half the money, and we proceeded. The result can be seen above. With no advertising or publicity, Rod (and a couple of other comics shops he distributed to) sold all the posters just by displaying them at their stores. Oh, it took a while, with Rod grumbling a bit, but they all sold eventually; now they're just a part of Rainier history too...

I'll end this simply by quoting the sci-fi pulps text added to the poster, which can't be made out in the tiny version above:

"Retro rockets firing, Fresh Gordon jockeyed his MFR-80 spaceship down onto the arid, dusty surface of planet Bungo.

"Then, aided by his thirsty companions of so many years, Fresh broke through the belligerent throng of alien vizki and d'jin, forging a path straight to the barren world's lone outpost of galactic civilization, the B'aarli Maltina. There the beerless company at last espied the liquid treasure for which they had quested so long--Mountain Fresh Rainier.

"Even Bing the Brewless was overcome. 'The Beer That Conquered the Galaxy' soon quenched five more parched throats."

An asterisk in the text let people know that "Fresh Gordon" was none other than "the incomparable Buster Crabbe."

Yeah, those were the days...

Rainier Beer: Television Ads

Working on the Rainier Beer account? You call that work? Well, as I wrote in the very first posting, I feel I've had a lucky life--mostly as witness, once in a while as active participant.

For a dozen years from 1973 to 1985, I was the official writer-producer for all the Rainier Beer ads released during that stretch of time--each year three-to-five radio ads, maybe a half-dozen TV ads, up to a dozen print ads, and whatever other support material was needed. (I especially enjoyed the sales films we were charged to create each year as a framing device to introduce new television ads... proudest of the one I wrote and produced that had a portly Alfred Hitchcock sound- and lookalike as host, pontificating at length about various cinematic matters, including suspense, while a bomb ticked away under the table next to him!)

Around 1971-72, the Rainier Beer Company (based in Seattle) got in touch with the creative group then called Heckler-Bowker to ask them to help pull Rainier out of its puny-sales doldrums. Terry Heckler, the reticent genius designer and concept man extraordinaire, convinced them to try doing totally off-the-wall ads that would become conversation pieces.

With some trepidation, the Rainier bosses agreed... and within six months regional beer sales were rising at a totally unprecedented rate, which then generated an astonishing high market share for many years. This success was the direct result of a television spot called "Frogs" (on the air and generating nationwide attention nearly two decades before Budweiser stole the idea) and a couple of lesser pieces that downplayed the beer itself and instead gave viewers something to laugh or scratch their heads at. Those early ones included the frogs croaking "Rainier," while mosquitoes added "Beer"; a female Liberace type whistling a Rainier ditty; a garish video parody of Lawrence Welk, his bubbles, and his middle-aged ballroom dancers; plus the ad that soon became the greatest single success of all, what everyone soon called "the Motorcycle Spot."

First, a bit more scene-setting; as I stated in an earlier posting, the original writer and H-B co-owner had abandoned ship by early 1973, leaving recently hired me as the writer in charge. Offered up as the buffer between Heckler, Rainier's canny marketing manager Jim Foster, and whoever was on board as support for any particular ad, I also quickly became the account lead, chief bottlewasher, and general patsy. But I also got to write everything that the boss didn't supply himself, meaning I handled all radio and print, plus scripts for the TV ads, a few of which I'd also conceived.

We served other clients too, of course, but it was Rainier that made Heckler Associates famous in the world of advertising, back when almost all ads were still straight and boring, maybe two decades before everyone attempted to be clever, utilizing later gadgets like video imaging and computer animation. We had shoestring budgets and no video tools to speak of, back then, but we did have lots of gumption and eager-to-cooperate production houses (most importantly Kaye-Smith led by director Gary Noren for the television ads, and Bear Creek Studio owned by producer Joe Hadlock and his business-brains wife Mannie, for the audio), not to mention a pretty free hand at dreaming up the concepts.

Over the dozen years we did a string of ads using giant, tilted-horizontal, running beer bottles (older readers may remember Merrill-Lynch's bull that was always "Bullish on America"; Rainier's bottles were "Beerish on America"), some of which also featured Mickey Rooney as a bottle hunter. (The Mick in other spots was also a rowdy cheerleader and then a Nelson Eddy singer who poured beer down his Jeannette MacDonald's bodice!) And there were dozens of visual or audio parodies--of The Twilight Zone, a great b&w Casablanca, Elvis, Ray Charles, Devo ("Is this not beer? It is Rai-nier. B-E-E-R!"), Tom Waits, the song "La Bamba," the Johnny Burnette Trio, the Supremes, and so much more. My Rainier Beer "Greatest Hits" reel in fact was a demand item for years, even helping raise money at school auctions (go figure)!

But I want to focus on a few TV ads that gave me some extra pleasure, or headaches, or both. The Motorcycle Spot, for example, really was the all-Northwest all-time favorite. Very simple: camera looking down a straight back-country road, nothing in sight, then gradually a spot becoming a motorcycle coming straight at the camera, passing close, flash-pan to follow it tailing off toward a looming Mount Rainier--and all the while the shifting gears have been keening/singing, distantly at first, then louder and louder, "Raaaaiiiii-niiieeeerrrr... (zoom by and receding sound) Beeeeerrrrrr..."

Looked amazingly simple, but of course there was much going on behind the scene. Building the soundtrack, for example, we found that we could not stretch the words out over the full 30 seconds, had to settle for 20-plus to be understandable--which meant the visuals had to not show any bike at first. Then trying to capture the actual motorcycle shot we found that we could not pan fast enough as the bike passed, so we had to make a hidden cut during the pan. And neither the weather nor the motorcycle itself cooperated at first--we had to go out filming on three different days to get the bike actually operating properly, at a time when Mount Rainier was also visible!

And, finally, I had the perfect visual tagline to be supered over the end-of-spot receding bike: "Geared for Thirst." But neither Heckler nor the Rainier people were willing to give up the bland accepted slogan "Mountain Fresh to Go," so my tag never appeared. Anyone reading this now has the real scoop of what should have been shown!

Our biggest TV production of all involved the running bottles. We'd already shown them solo and in herds (sixpacks? cases?), when someone came up with the idea of using them like the famous bulls of Pamplona (another idea stolen from us years later). The upshot was we staged a major happening in Seattle's Pioneer Square, with scores of milling fans all awaiting the arrival of the beers. And when they did suddenly show up, everyone had to scatter to escape their onslaught. As scriptwriter I had a great time drafting the on-camera newscaster's 30 seconds--stalling historical text followed by sudden frenzied reporting! "Why do the Rainiers run...?" indeed.

Another spot I remember fondly was a Rainier Light take-off mocking some other beer company's reliance on athletes as spokesmen. Ours showed a cute housewife opening a Rainier Light for herself while cheerfully telling the camera how much she likes all those burly guys advocating Light beers; but as she says, "You don't have to be macho to enjoy Rainier Light..."

Just then, her off-screen husband yells rudely, "Hey, Marlene, get me another beer!" And she explodes back at him, "GET IT YOURSELF, BOB!" (Viewing the footage in slow motion, we amused ourselves marvelling at how angry and distorted and reddened her face was for a slowed-down second.) Then immediately she is calm again, addressing the camera to finish her interrupted thought: "Sometimes it does help, though."

The audience loved it for the amazing performance by the actress and the in-your-face feminist approach in general. But I cherish it also because it's my voice off-camera yelling at her--the best of several uncredited appearances in Rainier spots. (I was handy, of course, pretty much unpaid always, and not allowed to collect residuals!)

The fourth TV ad I want to mention came during 1978, Rainier's 100th-year anniversary, which Heckler cleverly dubbed "The Beercentennial." The special-year ads revisited Rainier's Northwest history, had a brewmaster blow the heads off full schooners like birthday candles, and more.

But we went forward in time too, crafting a science fiction ad that in short order gave the viewer the black monolith from 2001... which turned out to be the facade of the Star Wars bar... and as we push through the doors and on through the rowdy alien crowd we find a back booth and table around which are seated aging lookalikes for Ming the Merciless, Dr. Zarkov, Dale, and Flash Gordon. The supporting characters were local actors, but playing our "Fresh" (as we renamed him) was the one and only Buster Crabbe, the original movie-serial Flash (Tarzan films too), older and greyer but still very much the handsome hero.

Like Mickey Rooney on his best days, Crabbe was full of great stories and definitely fun to be around, still muscular, still swimming great distances every day, still flirting with the women.

And it's Fresh Gordon that brings me to an important aspect of Rainier's advertising that I haven't talked about--the posters we produced to promote the beer. I'll discuss a few of them next time...