11 Forgotten Food And Drink Commercials From The '70s That'll Make You Feel Old

The 1970s were big years for TV advertisements. It birthed many landmark food and beverage campaigns like Miller Time for Miller High Life, Oscar Mayer's Bologna Song, and the Coca-Cola Hilltop ad, better known by its iconic jingle, "I'd like to buy the world a Coke." But not every nostalgic commercial is necessarily an ad industry icon.

The bevy of food and drink commercials from the decade includes old intellectual properties from fast food giants, like a trip into McDonaldland and a forgotten Taco Bell jingle. It also includes time capsules of now-iconic brands in their earlier years, with radically different appearances or target audiences compared to today.

Similarly, some of these commercials show well-known brands at particular moments in their history, from Tang's association with the Apollo space program to Coca-Cola's very first plastic bottle. There are even some discontinued products that people who were alive in the '70s may well remember, from a trippy kids' candy to mug-based instant noodles and the iconic discontinued soda, Tab.

Space Dust was an unfortunately-named Pop Rocks spinoff that had a short life. Kids enjoyed it, but parents disliked the name for sounding like angel dust, a common name for the dangerous hallucinogen PCP. And this trippy ad with Galactic Grape, Orbiting Orange, and Cosmic Cherry descending from the heavens like extraterrestrial flavor deities probably left some parents wondering if the drug-like name was intentional.

Today's McDonald's fans may be wondering who Evil Grimace is, but this is actually regular Grimace, originally cast as a McDonaldland villain. He made his debut in this 1971 advertisement using his four arms to steal milkshakes, prompting Ronald McDonald to pose as a Hollywood director to distract him and get the shakes back. But Evil was short-lived for Grimace, as McDonald's quickly softened his image into the lovable oaf (with 2 arms) known today.

Taco Bell didn't debut a breakfast menu until 2014, but this 1979 Taco Bell advertisement oddly shows customers lining up bright and early regardless. The spot takes viewers through an increasingly exuberant jingle about Taco Bell's fresh ingredients, matching a tagline of "The Fresh Food Place."

This Kool-Aid Man advertisement is practically a period piece, from its early use of his 70s-era, wall-blasting, "Oh yeah!" iteration, to the Scooby Doo-like mummy villain he scares off by dancing. And of course, it ends with everyone enjoying a glass of Kool-Aid.

Plastic pollution is widely understood as a major environmental problem, but it wasn't always seen that way. This 1978 Coca-Cola ad is all about the convenience of its new plastic 2-liter bottles — the company's very first plastic bottle, and a lightweight way to keep enough Coke on hand for friends and family. Plastic bottles transformed the soda industry, but also made giants like Coca-Cola some of the world's biggest plastic polluters.

Tang long enjoyed a space-age appeal ever since Apollo astronauts took packets of unbranded Tang to space. This ad continues Tang's association with space in a distinctly 70s animated cartoon aimed at children, with an alien who incorrectly thinks the reddish-orange planet Mars is made of Tang, and another alien who revives him with actual Tang.

Don't expect this 1979 ad to tell you that the difference between Miracle Whip and mayonnaise is essentially less oil with more water and sugar. Do expect it to bring the irreverent energy of a 1970s stage musical with singing hamburger puppetry, unlike any Miracle Whip ad you might see today.

This ad was part of a long-running campaign calling the malt liquor "one thing that stands out as a completely unique experience." This 1976 spot, likely inspired by the 1975 movie "Jaws," featured a suited man ignoring a shark attack to instead drink Colt 45. And it was completely unique from the image Colt 45 later developed, between hiring Billy Dee Williams as a spokesperson in 1986 and its appearance in the 2001 Afroman single "Crazy Rap," also known as "Colt 45 and 2 Zig-Zags."

This vintage Pizza Hut advertisement ran on NBC with airings of "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson," and featured Carson's sidekick Ed McMahon and bandleader Doc Severinsen making pizza in a brief comedic routine, with a notable appearance by an early and almost unrecognizable Pizza Hut logo, it will make you wonder what it was like eating at a Pizza Hut in the 70s.

This 1979 Betty Crocker ad showed a mom hurrying her son inside for a quick Mug-o-Lunch before playing baseball. As he's eating the instant noodle packet from a coffee mug, two New York Yankees players show up — then a back-to-back World Series-winning team — concerned that Mug-o-Lunch will make the kid outperform them on the field. But instant noodles won't win the World Series, and neither did the 1979 Yankees, who finished 4th in their division.

Tab is a famous discontinued soda with a rich history as Coke's first low-calorie beverage, and one that was heavily marketed to women. Unfortunately, some vintage Tab ads were sexist and creepy in their appeals for women to be memorably thin for men. This 1979 spot still features a woman sheepishly checking her weight, but the sunny jingle and other, happier images of people enjoying life — and Tab — together made a better blueprint for diet soda marketing.