Friday’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 three-panel format, a bald man is in the first panel. Although I didn’t know who he was, apparently it’s Duncan Goodhew, an “English former competitive swimmer. After swimming competitively in America as a collegian at North Carolina State University, he was an Olympic swimmer for Great Britain and won Olympic gold and bronze medals at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. He also swam at the 1976 Summer Olympics.” In the second panel, Goodhew sips from a mug of Heineken. You’d think the last panel would have shown our guy with a full head of hair. The tagline was changed “parts” to “pates,” which means “head.” But he has added some fur on top of his bald pate, although it is in the form of a live rabbit. Close, but not quite. If it wasn’t Heineken maybe I’d think they were trying to say the beer was “hoppy.”
The Beer Nut says
Duncan Goodhew was extremely famous when I was a kid in the early ’80s. I think he did endorsements for the egg marketing board as well, understandably.