by G. Jack Urso
In conversations
with various individuals who worked on Hot
Hero Sandwich, there has been some complaints about the commercials run
during the show and how aligned they were with the target demographic of tweens
and young teens. Finding a copy of the show taped off-air to see what
commercials were run were just as impossible to find as network copies of the
episodes — or so I thought.
In this video of
commercial clips assembled by Channel37.TV, an archive of video content created
from rescued home video tapes, we finally get a peek at the commercials run
during one of the Hot Hero Sandwich
episodes. This is remarkable because while VCR’s were available in 1979, they
were very expensive. I recall my local Sears was selling them for US$1,000 in
1980 (approx. US$4,123.33 in 2025), so finding a tape of an off-air copy of the
show is a remarkable find.
What we discover
being run at the Noon hour in the NYC market are largely cereal commercials advertising
toy premiums inside the box, plus a couple Public Service Announcements (PSAs).
This collection clocks in at four minutes thirty seconds. Since, at the time, hour-long
shows ran about 50 minutes there should be about ten minutes of commercials
here, so we can’t consider this a complete collection of commercial spots run during
episode 2 in NYC, but it does give us some insight.
Commercials run
during episode 2 of Hot Hero Sandwich on WNBC, New York include:
- PSA: Volunteer Bureau, Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies
- Promotional Spot: Guinness Game
- DC Comics Mini Comic Books (Post Peebles cereal box premium)
- Fruity Peebles cereal commercial
- Kool-Aid Commercial (Grease parody)
- 3 Musketeers candy bar commercial
- Trix cereal commercial
- Marvel Superheroes stickers (Trix cereal box premium)
- Keebler Peanut Butter Sandwich cookies commercial
- Frosted Rice commercial
- Squirmles toy commercial
- NBC PSA: How to Watch Television
See the clip provided above from the Hot Hero Sandwich Central YouTube channel.
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