Several very weird television ads for George McGovern's presidential campaigns in 1972 and 1984. Not quite Obama/Hilton weird, but still pretty out there.
As far as campaign ads go, these are pretty weird and discomforting. They should've seen the landslide coming.
These are incredible, and I would say much more effective than today's political ads. Especially powerful is the Vietnam sequence of a mother carrying her dead child - this would never be shown in today's mainstream television media. It's a powerful and hard to swallow message. Instead, we get Mccain suggesting that Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Barack Obama are sinisterly linked. At least Obama touches on the loss of jobs, but not really the reasons behind why those jobs are lost. Granted, the first ad shown here was pretty darn boring, the second corny as hell...but for the most part, these come across as 30 second film shorts, relying on viewers to use their minds a bit to fill in the gaps.
I agree, the Vietnam one would not be shown today, which is too bad. It was meant to be discomforting and bring home the whole point of innocent lives lost in a war. Two good books on the McGovern/Nixon race are "Fear and Loathing on the Campaing Trail," by Hunter S. Thompson and "The Boys on the Bus" by Timothy Crouse. And I count more than two ads, am I seeing double? I haven't even started drinking yet!
These old ads and videos and really cool, it's nice to how life and TV were different back then, and you can see that in this ad alone. I mean, who would put this on the air today.
