Posted by fústar in 
Today (or yesterday), somewhere in America (I can't be bothered to check the details) a saucer-shaped balloon flew through the sky for a while. Then it "crashed" gently to earth. So far, so boring – unless you're a rabid run-away balloon enthusiast. The juicy bit that held the various media spellbound and agog and hysterical (for about two and a half minutes) was the rumour that a small boy ("balloon boy") had crawled into the balloon shortly before take off. Except he hadn't. And was, instead, sensibly "hiding in a cardboard box in the garage attic".
Anyway, you know all that already – given that your consciousness is (undoubtedly) plugged straight into the scrolling-bar, 24/7, hyperbollix news shite-fest. It's already old. It was old before it happened. If it happened at all. Which it didn't…and did at the same time.
Reason I bring it up is that my immediate reaction, on hearing of it, was: "Viral ad Campaign". Given the apparently genuine panic caused – and the genuine rescue efforts of (hyper)real people – that reaction might seem deeply cynical and paranoid. But that's what living in a world of Total Spectrum Viral Advertising Dominance does to the human mind (or mine at least). The war in Iraq? Viral ad campaign that has yet to reveal its punchline. The mass extinction of the dinosaurs and the mammalian ascent that eventually produced mankind, civilization, and viral advertising itself? Ditto.
Things were rather different back in the damp, gullible, muck-covered, permanent twilight of 1980s Ireland. Back then 98% of all ads were for Triple "A" Golden Maverick. So when the teasing and mysterious words "Big Ed Loves Mona" (and nothing else) popped onto the screens of a pre-viral-ad, pre-internet, pre-most-things nation, the result was hysteria of War of the Worlds proportions. Except not really…though everyone was quite excited and reasonably curious about what it all meant.
I seem to recall it dragging on for some time, with cryptic clues carefully dropped here and there to whet appetites and keep us nattering about it over our nonexistent water-coolers. By the time all was due to be revealed tension had cranked the mystery up to Third Secret of Fatima levels. Whatever it meant, it meant something big. Something huge. Something earth-shattering and apocalyptic.
It was about yogurt. Yogurt. Yogurt called Mona. Disgusting and scarcely edible yogurt called Mona. And Big Ed was someone who liked it. Who liked this yogurt. Yogurt! Something snapped and broke that day. We were dragged from a just-about-modern slumber into the dizzying vortex of postmodernity. By yogurt.
And what of "balloon boy"? Ad for Häagen-Dazs. Or Ben & Jerry's. Truth to be revealed shortly. Keep watching the skies (and CNN).
My father had taken care to warn me that all advertising was lies. Nonetheless, It took Puma to drive the point home.
They ran a 2 month countdown to the ‘end of shoelaces’. Still have shoelaces.
I liked Mona. Or I thought I did. In any case, I ate enough of it to send the required number of foil lids off to Monaghan in expectation of a Big Ed frisbee. It arrived in far less than the standard “28 days”. In fact, I received the thing practically by return post, suggesting that if summer interns were taken on by Monaghan Dairies to deal with the frisbee-rush, too many were engaged. As luck would have it, it arrived on my door-step on one of the three sunny days in Ireland during the 1980′s, and I was in no time at all flinging the thing about. One over-zealous throw later, and it was sailing out of reach into some place irrecoverable, even with adult assistance. After a mere few hours, it was lost to me forever. Now, like an ageing lothario, haunted only by the one that he could not win, I look upon it as the one that got away. Though I was denied all but a fleeting moment with it, its demise in, nay before, its prime means that its youthful glamour remains forever untouched, the Rupert Brooke of promotional plastic toys. Forgive my misty-eyed reverie, but the memory of that frisbee, like the yoghurt it promoted, is bitter-sweet.
I hadn’t thought about Mona yoghurts in years.
Thank you SO much for undoing all that expensive therapy.
My parents didn’t open my mind up to the forces that try to shape & dupe us to quite the same extent. They limited their cynicism to madly annoying, rain-on-my-parade comments about the various implausibilities going on in whatever film I happened to be watching. James Bond (who I loved as a nipper) came in for particular scorn.
“Hah! How’d he do that?!” “Sure, that would never happen!” “Ah, come on. That’s a bit hard to swallow!”.
I’d sit there grinding my teeth to dust and praying for a future when multiple TVs in a single household would become commonplace.
You didn’t. You couldn’t have. See Daragh’s comment if you don’t believe me. You liked that frisbee (or the rose-tinted memory of a frisbee lost) so much that it’s positively coloured your taste recollections. It’s your rosebud.
I bet there isn’t a single traceable Big Ed frisbee anywhere in the world right now…just to make you feel worse. The disposable artifacts of 70s/80s Irish pop culture are insanely hard to find. Presumably they’re all in attics, or landfill. But nobody cares. If scarcity automatically equaled value then Big Ed’s frisbee, and mint condition (free a) nippers, would be going for massive sums in Sotheby’s.
How true. I was googling the many commemorative festivals (From Galway 500, through the Dublin Millennium to the final “how d’you like them apples” of Mayo 5000 ) of the 80′s and found barely a jot about them online. More revsionist denial of our embarrassing pre-latte past.
What on earth is Triple A Golden Maverick? Something for cows?
Big Ed just needs to view AmaZING Grace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjK_yVdGNGk