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My kid asked why I still hum the Toys R Us song, so I actually sat down and figured out it's been 34 years
Last week my 9 year old was digging through a box of my old stuff in the garage and pulled out a Geoffrey plush I forgot we even had, and she asked me why I started humming without thinking about it. I told her that jingle is just parked in my brain like a car that never leaves the driveway, and she wanted to know when I learned it. So I did the math out loud, standing right there next to the holiday bins. I was 6 years old in 1990, watching Saturday morning cartoons in our old house near Dayton, and that "I don't wanna grow up" song came on during basically every break. I can still hear the exact way the kids sang the last line, and I can't remember what I had for lunch on Tuesday. That night I fell down a rabbit hole on my phone for about two hours watching old toy commercials from 1988 to 1993. The Crossfire one, the Skip It one, all of it came back like muscle memory. What got me is how a 15 second ad from three decades ago is still louder in my head than anything I heard on the radio this morning. Does anybody else have a jingle that kicks in at the weirdest times, and is it always a toy ad for you too?
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derekjenkins1mo ago
Man, I used to roll my eyes when people talked about jingles sticking with them forever. I figured it was just nostalgia talk, you know, old people wanting to feel young again. But a few years back I caught myself humming the Oscar Mayer wiener song while doing dishes and I stopped cold. I hadn't heard that thing on TV since I was a kid but my brain played it perfect, words and all. That's when I got it. Those ads got wired into us during Saturday cartoons when our brains were still soft and everything stuck. Forty years later they're still running in the background while I forget where I put my keys this morning. So yeah, that post is right. Short ads from childhood outlast almost everything else.
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