About This Thing

Television was a wonderful thing. I miss it. And television commercials were culture-shapers. An advertiser had the attention of tens of millions of people who were sitting in their living room at a specific time watching CBS' broadcast of Romancing The Stone or a special presentation of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus hosted by someone who must have been a famous TV actress - because why else would she be the one hosting?

The Internet is also a wonderful thing. It gave us YouTube, and some of the greatest humans on earth spend their time collecting TV commercials from old broadcasts somebody 40 years ago had the amazing foresight to record on VHS and store away (no doubt beautifully cataloged and alphabetized) and uploading them to YouTube.

As an American born in the late 1960s and, incidentally, someone whose parents were influenced enough by TV ads to purchase a Curtis Mathes television set (we knew we'd made it then), watching those TV ads today reminds me what my world was made of. That's not an exaggeration - it's not just the products being advertised, it's the fashion, the haircuts, the music, the vibe that TV commercials remind us of. And they also remind me that I know exactly when "by ... Mennen" is going to be sung when a Speed Stick commercial plays and exactly what that third girl they show on the ski slope in that Juicy Fruit commercial looks like.

So Too Late To Turn Back is an outlet for me, a "newspaper writer" by both education and experience, to publish the thoughts I have as I watch hours upon hours of TV commercials every week because they are fantastic and better than any Netflix series. I'll excerpt specific commercials from these archives - always will full proper credit and links to the work of these heroic Americans finding and publishing hundreds of hours of commercials - with my hopefully entertaining thoughts on what they reflect about the culture of the time, the general weirdness of America back then, the superiority of that culture to today's or whatever.

If this website looks weird, that's because it's loosely based on what the finer websites of the world looked like circa 2002. Pretty much just an aesthetic choice of somebody who began working for Internet companies in 1997. So, sorry for that.

Too Late To Turn Back is a project of Thunder Island Studio LLC, a small - as in just my old lady and me - operation where we make things that interest us. She doesn't know I'm making this site (yet). But we do also have a store called Frank Lear Designs where we offer shirts and things with pretty unique and interesting designs on them. And other stuff will come in time. Whatever we come across that we think might be fun and interesting to work on.