Tuesday’s ad is for Heineken, from the 1970s. In the later 1970s, Heineken embarked on a series of ads with the tagline “Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach.” Many of the ads were in a sequential panel, or comic strip, format and they were intended to be humorous.
In this ad, a two-panel vertical format, the Mother Goose character Humpty Dumpty has already had his great fall, and is sitting on the grass beneath the wall he’s just fallen from with cracked noggin. He looks like he’s in pretty bad shape. And while “[a]ll the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again,” one sip from a mug of Heineken and he’s good as gold, right as rain and fit as a fiddle. He’s even back on his wall, with a smile on the face of his now intact body, with a blue sky at his back. That’s some damn powerful beer.
