A collection of the weirdest, most cringeworthy songs and visuals used to sell products.

By Pavlo Fedykovych

Mourn, everybody, for the era of the advertisement jingle is dead. Those hokey, ubiquitous ditties intended to sell products and entice us to buy them simply became irrelevant in the 21st century.

Blame it on the internet, the growth of music licensing, or our ever-shrinking attention spans, but the fact is those commercial tunes that once permanently inhabited our radio waves and TV stations have since been killed and replaced with pop songs, cinematic story arcs, and in many cases, no music at all.

It wasn't always like this, though. After World War II, commercial jingles saw an overwhelming rise fueled by the postwar economic boom. From the 1950s to the 1970s, during the height of the era, "the jingle composer had virtually unlimited budgets, could hire the best musicians, and could do whatever he really wanted," said Tim Taylor, the author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture.

The power of these product-selling jingles was simple. Advertisers wanted to create “earworms” — catchy pieces of music that were easy to remember and hard to forget. If a product wasn’t popular or selling well, a well-written jingle could usually help boost sales.

The tactic worked well for many decades until it didn’t. By the turn of the century, brands had become more interested in licensing songs from artists and record labels, noting that the use of popular music had a greater impact on influencing customer’s purchasing decisions. The last nail in the commercial jingle's coffin was the growth of the internet, with sites like Facebook and YouTube introducing an entirely new way to view and consume ads.

Though some have been lost to time, you can still find a number of vintage commercial jingles online — including these five.

Betty Crocker’s "You Sweet Talker" — 1985

Just a dad and his son enjoying their Betty Crocker cake, right? Normal, regular father-child dynamics here, yeah? Or is there perhaps something more sinister going on?

Just watching this ad until the end will make you wonder how it ever got approved as a commercial jingle for the universally loved dessert brand.

Backed by a very ‘80s instrumental, we are treated to an uncomfortably up-close shot of the father pressing his cheek a bit too intimately against that of his toddler son.

“I wonder if that’s for me,” the child says as images of a cake slathered in vanilla frosting take up the screen.

Instead of saying something like, “Yes, son, it is!” the dad creepily exclaims, "Oh, boy," with the fervency of an adult performer at the top of his game.

This is followed by sexually suggestive lyrics like, "I got you a cupcake, sweet talk in disguise" and “I tumble and I crumble when you ripple and rise,” backed with lots of very sensual cake cutting and cream pouring — maybe too sensual given the previous visuals.

It ends with footage of the father and son eating cake in a normal way, which is how it should have been all along. But instead, we've got a creepy commercial jingle with a not-so-hidden sexual subtext involving an older man and a child.

Chili’s "Baby Back Ribs" — 2002

For reasons unknown, the members of the hugely popular American boy band *NSYNC find themselves stranded on a desert island. It’s obvious that they’ve been there a while and been through some shit, with each of them wearing tattered and ripped clothing.

But instead of pining for food, water, or shelter, we quickly learn what they miss the most: baby back ribs.

That’s right, they’re stranded on an archipelago in the middle of nowhere and the only thing that’s on their minds, the only thing that really matters to them, is the latest new menu item at Chili’s.

Chris appears to be the most resourceful of the band, wearing a bandana across his forehead, presumably to prevent sunstroke, but also probably just because it makes him look cool.

The other members of *NSYNC decide against wearing headdresses. They have other things to do.

J.C. throws an empty wine bottle, presumably with a note coiled up inside of it. Justin shows us his mastery of drawing tally marks on a rock. Closer inspection reveals that it has been 14 days since the boy band became stranded on the damned tropical paradise. Or was it 14 hours? Or years?

Lance decides to stand out from the rest by over-enthusiastically rapping the "I want my baby back" mantra.

Suddenly, a helicopter arrives above the stranded boy band, and it seems as if they’re about to be rescued until the camera pans back to reveal that they don’t want to be saved after all. They just want baby back ribs, as the sticks they’ve used to write “SEND RIBS” in the sand indicate.

Joey is so happy about the helicopter’s arrival that he starts energetically dancing, only to be squashed moments later by a wooden Chili’s crate dropped from the plane. The remaining members of *NSYNC look surprised, but their hunger wins out.

In the next shot, they’re all eating the ribs, except for Joey. He’s still under the Chili's box and the ad ends with his feet dancing to the music.

Jell-O’s “Kids Go Ape” — 1995

In 1995, Bill Cosby was one of the most famous and beloved people in America. In 2019, he's a man guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault and accused of sexual assault by more than 60 women, including two cases of child sexual abuse that allegedly happened in 1974 and 1982. Cosby has fallen so low that his name is sometimes used as a verb for drugging and violating someone.

So here he is, Bill Cosby, rapping among innocent, unsuspecting children. One of the children oddly happens to be Lindsay Lohan, a person that subsequently would have articles like "The Lindsay Lohan Drug Abuse Story: A Timeline" written about her.

There's a lot of Jell-O grape fun going on in this ad, and none of it makes any sense.

For starters, why is this old man hanging around with little children? He raps, he smiles, and at some point, he even does a creepy dance.

Cosby is in possession of a fridge stacked high with Jello-O containers, which he shows us by opening the fridge’s door. Given the comedian's alleged history of slipping sedatives into the drinks of unsuspecting women, let's hope that there's no Spanish Fly in any of those grape Jell-O cups.

The video ends with a secondary advertisement for the VHS release of Jurassic Park. The film, however, is PG-13, which was probably a real bummer for the kids this ad was targeting who were definitely not old enough to see it on their own.

Oh, and the whole jingle is called "Kids Go Ape." Here's the Urban Dictionary definition of the phrase “go(ing) ape:”

"The Moo & Oink Dance" — 1982

This commercial jingle starts with Kanye-like sampling of the word "Moo." Considering that it's a local ad for a Chicago meat market, its slick beats should come as no surprise.

Moo and Oink are two humans dressed in larger-than-life full-body costumes of their respective animals, gleefully dancing as the slaughtered and sliced remains of their brothers and sisters line the shelves behind them wrapped in cellophane for customers to buy. An enthusiastic if not hyper rapper narrates the video, and we don't know who's singing it as the costumed humans' mouths do not move.

We see Tommy showing off his skills as he weighs cellophaned chicken fillets on a scale.

We also see lots and lots of dancing going on in the store. Customers seem to be having a helluva time while doing their shopping at Moo & Oink.

We just hope that the costumed animals weren’t slaughtered afterwards like seemingly every other animal in the store. The scream at the end of the video indicates that this may not have been the case.

Usher's "Twix Worlds" — 2002

Usher’s swagger and dance moves are used to the full-force in this trippy Twix's ad, which seems to confuse the chocolate bars with some powerful drug trip.

His psychedelic journey begins with a roller coaster ride on a white chair that has a speaker for a headrest.

Next, Usher is in a car. Two blondes are seated next to him before disappearing and turning into another version of Usher himself, then a dog, and then another hot girl.

Quite logically, the video takes us to an underwater kingdom after that where the singer is doing a more relaxed version of the same dance in front of a few fish, two whales, and, of course, a mermaid.

Just when you accept the existence of a fantasy world with Blade Runner-like cities and ocean kingdoms, the action is moved to the moon. Naturally, when Usher is there, astronauts can't resist the urge to dance amongst the craters.

At the end of the video, Usher is back on Earth at a Twix-themed party seated in the same chair that he started in — a hint that maybe he never actually left and was imagining the strange journey he just went on.

Blame it on drugs? Or the Twix? It isn’t clear, but we definitely want whatever he had.