No discussion of '90s commercials is complete without the Thighmaster. My mom owned one!
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Same here and she also owned a cookbook from Susan Powter.
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Any Canadians remember those “Pick Up The Phone” 1-900 ads for a party line featuring scantily clad women on chain link fences. I always imagined them say “Call me, so we can figure out how to get to the other side of the fence.”
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I remember those 900 commercials with all the pretty women; I remember staying up until 2 or 3 AM during summer vacation and watching television. In between the really late night programming, these commercials would run.
I wonder how many minors called these lines.
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Anyone remember HBO’s Hardcore TV?
The Miracle Stick / It’s a Belt commercials were a favorite.
I’m not sure what made me think of it the other day, but remember the Miss Cleo psychic hotline ads? I seem to remember them memeing hard for a while.
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I remember reading a long article about that particular scam from one of the “psychics.” They were barely given any training in how to answer calls.
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What, psychics are a scam?!
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I think this was the article:
After Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network went bankrupt, someone from the Daily Show with Craig Kilborn interviewed her:
“So, none of your employees saw this coming?”
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There’s a Miss Cleo doc on Max that I watched on the way out. I thought it would be more bonkers than it was. The one big revelation was that the actress behind Miss Cleo was a lesbian (“was” because she died in recent years).
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I don’t think I’ve ever been less underwhelmed by a “big revelation.”
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As I think I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have a smartphone or any other working camera besides my crappy flip phone and Mac Photobooth, so…
MR_Potroast did some stage/roadie-type assistance for them. (About a year before we met offline.) The back of the shirt says, “Staff.” When this got a little ragged and too small for him, I saved it from ragbag oblivion. It still more or less fits, though it sat in the mending pile for a year before I finally got to it yesterday. 
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Remember that craze of dead celebs in commercials?
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Elton John fantastically surfed on top of those dead folks. I barely noticed them!
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The Nineties were also the heyday of Martha Stewart and Living magazine. My roommate used to get the catalogs, which were relentless and showed up at least 8-10 times a year. (Williams Sonoma was the same.) She never kept them long, so I’d add them to my stack of collage fodder. Meaning to cut into them but never doing so.
Fast-forward to the year that Stewart got a fresh burst of publicity after being released from jail. I had long since moved to my new place and MR_Potroast moved in with me a year later. I still had that stack of untouched catalogs and we needed some cash. On a whim, we put the stack on ebay to see what would happen. A ferocious bidding war broke out and we ultimately pocketed well over $100. Which was unusual for us both since we were only hobby ebay brokers, not the real thing. Thanks, Martha. <3
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The 90s was also the time of the Great Collect Call Wars. There were no survivors!
I assume.
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DEATH TO 10-10-321! GOD SAVE 1-800-COLLECT!
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CALVERT DeFOREST CONTINUES TO LIVE IN OUR HEARTS THROUGH OBSCURE PHONE SERVICE COMMERCIALS
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