The Sega 32X Had the Greatest Infomercial Ever

If you ever wanted to read an absurd amount of words about a Sega 32X Infomercial, I am your man! I wrote about Absolutely Rose Street for the Laser Time podcast website. Check it out!

Phillips CD-i Commercials Starring Phil Hartman!

The Phillips CD-i was a little known platform in the early 1990s that attempted to bridge the gap between a personal computer and a video game console. Several factors led to this not catching on, but they did make an attempt to get some notoriety in the advertising space.

Enter Phil Hartman. Hartman, probably best known for his stint on Saturday Night Live, was a comedian whose life was cut way too short in 1998. He was a special kind of talent and anyone who was familiar with anything related to comedy in the 1990s knows him and his work well. It doesn't surprise me that he would be sought after to bring some life to the flailing CD-i platform. The sale price mentioned at the end of this series of ads is $299 with "$200 in free software" so they must've been pretty desperate at this point.

Anyway, Hartman fits like a glove in these ads, where he dresses up as several different characters (both male and female) and narrates the commercials while the characters act out situations in which they discover the joy that the CD-i platform, the "next generation CD player," can bring to their lives.

Check out all 3 below.