Hey Folks! It's Intermission Time, Vol. 5 (Something Weird). [Category: Commercial]

Snack bar promos, local ads, timers, and cheesy time-fillers are the order of the day on this volume of this excellent series. The many easy-listening, pleasant-images time-fillers on this tape can be hard to sit through if you're not a die-hard ephemera fan, but I am, so I still give this tape high ratings. Besides, the snack bar promos are a lot of fun.

Highlights:

• The peppy blonde from the jazzy Dr. Pepper promos reappears here. This time, she sings "Dr. Pepper Is the Friendly Pepper-Upper."
  
• Nutrition Alert!: Candy bars are "wholesome". Mission Orange Drink is "naturally good".
  
• Additions to the I-Don't-Buy-It-for-a-Minute List: a chef who comes out to your car at the drive-in who appears in one snack bar promo; the Winchester Bank's claim that they give you "a better, happier life"; and the concept of "towing satisfaction" in the ad for Woodhill Exxon.
  
• "Electronic Music Created by the Optigan": This is a very primitive version of the kind of thing you see if you use the music CD-playing feature on your Sony Playstation. With cheesy, roller-rink-type organ music. I keep waiting for Ernie Kovacs to start singing "Mack the Knife" in Hungarian.
  
• This tape has more disgusting food in it than any other. Hot dogs are pale, fleshy pink with bloody-looking toppings, shakes look like freshly-mixed plaster of Paris, pizza looks like roadkill or cow pies, soft drinks are in extra-small cups without a trace of ice, hamburgers are only a few microns thick, etc. Watch for the topper, though: an unidentified sandwich appearing in the lower left corner of the screen during a "settle back, well- fed, etc." promo near the end of the tape. This can only be properly described as a Barf Sandwich.
  
• Probably the coolest image on this tape is a cleverly-animated claymation snack bar attendant who emerges from a blob of clay. He opens two snack bar promos which are otherwise very ordinary.
  
• Why did the owners of the Meadow Park Apartments settle for such a bland slogan as "a place to live" when they could have had one as great as the one for Toohey's Auto Supply: "When your car goes phooey, see Toohey!"?
  
• Additions to the Bucky Beaver Evil List: the creepy opening of a generic anti-freeze ad featuring a weathergirl and a disembodied voice moaning "freeeeeeze, freeeeeeze!"; and the timers featuring "Ma" (the effect of these is cumulative). And "your potato expert", while not completely evil, is certainly way too interested in the potato he's holding.
  
• Hardcore thrifters should watch for the J. B. Epperson Furniture ad––it features a truly amazing 50s living room set made of "long-lasting Plyhyde". It's got to be in a thrift somewhere because it looks thoroughly indestructable.
  
• If the food in the snack bar promos hasn't made you lose your lunch yet, just wait till you see the broasted chicken in the Carl's Bar-B-Q ad.
  
• This tape has only one snack bar promo featuring the Ubiquitous Family, but it's essential. In it, the voice-over announcer invites Mom to forget cooking dinner and feed her family all the disgusting drive-in snack bar food instead.
  
• One maker of time-fillers decided that the typical photographs of nature were a little too edgy for his taste and so substituted paint-by-number landscapes.
  

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: *****. Weirdness: *****. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: *****.