I should say St. Valentine's Day. Well, not anymore, it's now Friday, but this post somehow disappeared after writing it about 24 hours ago.
I never dreamt I'd someday look back fondly at the Crazy Eddie television commercials. Yet, here I find myself waxing nostalgically over some Northeastern pop culture detritus.
I never embed, I usually just link, but I've reconsidered my position on that. Why send the eyeballs elsewhere when they can stay right here.
I remember buying vinyl records and cassettes at Crazy Eddie, as well as a floppy disk drive for my Atari 800XL computer. These ads actually inspired the Seinfeld episode entitled, “The Junk Mail”. Elaine dates a guy who was once the fictional television pitchman known as “The Wiz”. Incidentally, The Wiz, later known as Nobody Beats The Wiz, was also an electronics retailer located predominantly in New York and New Jersey. But since their prices weren't completely insane they often used real-life characters in their ads, such as Joe Namath.
This was long before Namath went 0-for-2 in pass attempts on the sidelines, seeking out kisses from Suzy Kolber. (Yep, that link goes to the infamous video. I thought it would look kind of crappy to put two embedded videos in the same post. Especially when the point of this video was to highlight the Crazy Eddie ads, and not focus on the ancillary Joe Namath reference.)
I got such a kick out of this guy when I was a kid weaning on the idiot-box. now he seems like such a harbinger of the apocapitalypst . I'm pretty sure he fled the country on tax-evasion charges or some shit.
Eddie Antar fled the country and was brought back on racketeering and fraud charges. Then he was sentenced to 8 years in prison for fraud charges. The guy in the commercials is actually a radio dj named Jerry Carroll.