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Ads from Italy

All through my young life I had many experiences with visual images, since nowadays images are every where in everyday life. But of all images that I have seen since being born there, are few that I really remember. Many of them are not even worth remembering but in one way or the other I still remember them. Most of these visual images come from TV commercials or TV shows.

One of the oldest memories from a TV is a commercial for Coca-Cola. The ad was representing a huge coke can, made out of plastic, rolling down a beach. It looked more like a dune from the desert because the sea was shown only at the last shot. Around this huge Coke can there were a dozen or more kids, all happy and running with it. At the end was shown everybody drinking a Coca-Cola, which now had stopped. I saw this ad at night because it was the only time I was around to be able to watch TV since I had school until five in the afternoon. I was in probably third or fourth grade. Every time I saw this ad, I wanted to drink a Coca-Cola and go to the beach.

Another TV commercial that I remember was for women's stockings. The brand name was "Leva" which in Italian means to take off. The ad was very cheesy and not very well done. The commercial showed, in different color backgrounds, different stockings worn by mannequins legs. In the middle there was the word "Leva," which changed color at the same time as the background. This commercial most of the time really made me change the channel. First of all because it showed stuff that I personally didn't need and second, because I couldn't stand the commercial. I was in fourth or fifth grade.

Another commercial from TV that I really liked was an ad for a kid game called "Domino Rally." This game consisted of Domino pieces, which have a rectangular shape. To play you put them one in front of the other and make them fall. With this you can make a pretty fun game of who can make the longest paths. In the commercial they were showing crazy paths going all over the room and with a bunch of turns and even circles. I was amazed by this game because the commercial was very good, but I never got to try it because I never had it. Probably it was very hard to make it run as the TV was showing, because it looked too simple. Probably you need a lot of patience, which a little kid doesn't have.

Another memory from my youth this time regards a Sunday soccer show. The show is called "90 minute" which means 90th minute. This show is called like that because that is how long a soccer game lasts. The program was showing all of the highlights of the games played. The thing that I will always remember is the opening song and the image with it. At the beginning the image was showing an empty stadium that gets filled up very fast with people, and at the end of the song the stadium is completely filled up ready for a big game. In one corner there were numbers going from zero to ninety. The whole image was very fast, maybe fifteen seconds, but I really liked it. I remember that many times I was more interested to see the opening song than the actual program, and if I missed it I would be pissed. This TV show is still on, but now they changed the opening scene and replaced it with some computerized soccer images. The old opening scene was on until at least 1986. I thought that was a very good start to attract viewers.

Another commercial that impressed me was for Marlboro cigarettes. Most of the time there was a cowboy running wild in the side country or chasing horses and then lighting a cigarette. I never really understood what nature and wildlife had to do with cigarettes. Back then I wasn't a smoker and that commercial didn't make me start to smoke. Even now that I am a smoker, every time I see one of those commercials I would like to quit smoking. I never really understood that campaign.

The last image that I am going to talk about happened just a couple of years ago. It was my first year in college and one of my roommates was addicted to collecting old motorcycle magazines. Once I was looking at one of them and I saw an incredible ad for Volkswagen. It took the whole page. It was a picture taken from over a bridge at of highway in a moment of heavy traffic. The whole picture was in black and white except the Volkswagen cars or vans, which were in color. It was amazing to look at an ad from the late seventies with a lot of old fancy cars and a lot of bugs and vans. I don't remember the actual year of the magazine but I believe was at the end of the seventies. I really liked that ad which at the bottom saying that there are always more and more Volkswagens in the USA, but I liked it a lot because of the fact that there were a lot of old kinds of cars that now are very hard to see.

So these are the images that I remember from my youth from media. They all link in my brain and they help me to place other events in me life. Television to many has became one of the most important thing to do daily and this is very sad but some time is indispensable. It is strange that now days we have to refer at television ads. (at least in my case) to remember when happened what. Probably I remember these ones better because I really liked them or because they were so good that were hard to forget.

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