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.

Anti-Drug PSA Where Mario Says You're Going to Hell!

If you lived through the 1980s or 1990s in the United States, there's almost no chance you made it through that time period without hearing about the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign. It was a huge PR move from the federal government at the time and it eventually became a phrase you couldn't escape. When you went to school there would be "Just Say No" flyers everywhere, when you went home you'd see public service announcements and TV specials involving your favorite cartoon characters repeating it ad nauseam. Your parents were saying it, your teachers were saying it, the President and First Lady of the United States were saying it. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Muppet Babies were saying it, the Flintstone Kids with popstar Michael Jackstone were saying it.

Wherever you went, you'd find someone there to tell you not to smoke crack or freebase.

There's a lot to be said about the Just Say No campaign, but I basically just wanted to use this as a preface to share a very short PSA from a person who played a video game character on TV.

Five Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Commercials!

After a 2 month sabbatical because life tends to get in the way, Retro Game Dad is back and this time we are going to follow up on a previous post regarding Super Nintendo television commercials. This time, we want to give the Sega kids on the playground some debate ammo when the Nintendo fans come at you with their whack arguments!

Click through for more!

Five Super Nintendo Game Commercials!

There's something magical about watching television commercials from the past. If you take the time to watch some commercials from a particular time period you'll be able to get a feel of what pop culture was like at the time.

When you watch these five SNES commercials, you'll be able to learn one thing about the early 1990s.

They were weird.