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It was the days of American flag speedos, florescent blue cummerbunds and inordinate amounts of non-special edition Star Wars VHS. As an employee at Harkins Tri-City Dollar Theater, my all-time favorite movie to sweep up after was Teenage Mutant Turtles III because it featured “that one song from the Listernine commercials”. This was before the Internet granted unto us access to unlimited knowledge and power, so until Tarzan Boy appeared during the closing credit of TMNT III we had no way of knowing the title of the song or who performed it, or even how to get a copy.  As it turned out, “Tarzan Boy performed by Baltimora” was released as a cassette single in conjunction with the film.

Best $1.99 I ever spent.

Around this time Listerine/Pixar did something that would have otherwise been thought impossible.  They made a follow up Cool Mint Listerine commercial that was even more awesome than “Jungle”.  Shifting from Tarzan to Robin Hood, this commercial, titled “Arrows”,  began with a series of arrows missing a row archery targets.  Suddenly the last target is hit dead center of the bulls eye.  A whip pan reveals a Robin Hood like Listerine bottle leaping onto a tree branch.  The rest of the commercial is the bottle landing bulls eye after bulls eye while flipping  twisting and bounding through the trees . . . all set to Tarzan Boy.  It was the pinnacle of Listerine advertising and of commercial production in general.

Jake captured “Arrows” on VHS (the format of choice back then) while recording Navy Seals off the TV.  We watched that commercial, shared it, re-watched it, passed it around and watched it again and again and again . . . almost as many times as we played the cassette.

As of this writing, Listerine “Arrows” is not available anywhere on-line.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 8:37 pm and is filed under CRAAB History, CraabQuinoX, Native Beat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.