Coca-Cola's iconic "Hilltop" spot might have come in many years before my time, but it's still an ad tremendous nostalgia for me. It's a strange nostalgia - basically, a nostalgia filtered through somebody else's nostalgia, and for something I didn't even remember from the time. You see, my nostalgia is not for the original ad from 1971, but for the sequel that arrived just over eighteen years later, and which debuted during Super Bowl XXIV on 28th January 1990. I have no memory of watching the ad in the year it appeared, but I stumbled across it three or four years later on a home recording. Back then I was experiencing my induction into the slippery world of nostalgia by mining old VHS tapes for old ads and idents, and delighting whenever any of them had the vaguest chimes of familiarity for me, and I unearthed this one particular ad that opened with a blonde-haired woman informing her daughter that "You know it happened right here, twenty years ago." I was intrigued and maybe a little frustrated that the ad never specified what had happened upon that hill twenty years ago, but before I knew it the woman had burst into this hopeful song about doves and apple trees, all of these other people were flocking out of the blue to join her (each and every one of them brandishing a Coca-Cola bottle), and the ad worked a remarkable kind of magic on me. I still lived in blissful ignorance of the original ad to which it was referring (a clip showing a facial close-up of the then-teenage protagonist Linda Higson plays, but only fleetingly), and yet I felt intuitively that I understood exactly what was going on; that whatever had happened twenty years ago was recurring again with these people, and it was as alive as it ever had been. Even at the time I thought it bemusing that the consumption of Coca-Cola was being equated with laudable values like loving the Earth and your fellow human, but there was nevertheless something wondrous about the notion of the hills spontaneously erupting in a great euphoric flare, and everyone convening to sing about the joys of peace, love and Coca-Cola. In 1990, the ad signified a convergence of the old and new - the adult participants singing their old nostalgic jingle, as the younger generation races in singing the current "Can't Beat The Feeling" jingle - and yet by the time I discovered it, the ad, barely a few years old, already struck me as a relic of a bygone time. The fashions and hairstyles seemed mildly out of step with contemporary trends, and "Can't Beat The Feeling" had long been replaced by "Can't Beat The Real Thing", and more recently by "Always Coca-Cola". The ad had the power to transport me back into another time, a not-too-distant past that nevertheless seemed a world removed, and in the process put me in touch with an altogether more remote past, one that I had not experienced first-hand and which was much more fuzzily-defined. I still didn't know what had happened twenty years ago, but I felt the same yearning for it that the characters did. It was a borrowed memory through a borrowed memory, and my misplaced warm feelings were putty in the hands of the Powers That Be. The message of the ad was that the world keeps turning and the population keeps regenerating; change is inevitable, and generations come and go, but Coca-Cola is the one great constant, our cultural and temporal unity. The time may be wildly out of joint, but there's always Coca-Cola.
The 1990 ad is popularly known as "Hilltop Reunion", although "Generations" is given as the onscreen title, and it features around twenty-five members of the original assembly and their families. Tracking down as many of the original cast as possible was no small task - naturally, Linda Higson, who had been working as an au pair in Italy when she was picked to open the 1971 ad, was the most coveted of the lot, but she very nearly slipped the net. As this Associated Press article explains, since that ad, she had moved back to her native Britain, married and assumed the name Neary, and to further complicate matters, Coca-Cola had incorrectly recorded her maiden name as Hipson, meaning that their chances of tracing her were akin to finding a needle in the haystack. In the end, their last ditch option was to run a print ad in several key newspapers, and this was fortuitously seen by one of Neary's friends and brought to her attention. Neary once again opens the ad, this time accompanied by her 10-year-old daughter Kelly.
The above ad is the version that I'm familiar with, although it seems that there was an alternate version, which I'm going to assume was the one that played to US audiences. This one can be found in the video below, which also contains some behind-the-scenes footage.
Watching the above version, there are two key differences that immediately leap out at me - firstly, the voices of Neary and her daughter have been conspicuously dubbed to remove their British accents. Secondly, every repeated utterance of "The feeling you get from a Coca-Cola Classic!" plays like a jar on my personal nostalgia; it's vaguely dislocating, like seeing a version of your own memory misremembered through someone else's. In early 1990, Coca-Cola was still feeling the knock-on effects of the introduction of New Coke in 1985, and I'm not sure at what point they stopped having to specify which of the beverages they were referring to in a given campaign (I don't think this was such an issue outside of the US and Canada, where the original formula was never replaced). Although Coca-Cola is presented as the one constant in an ever-changing world, that specification adds its own layer of meaning. Compared to the non-Classic ad, this one presents a somewhat disturbed timeline, in which the beverage's identity has been confused, and the unbeatable feeling described by the Hilltop gang has faced a threat to its existence. Calling it a "classic" suggests a more vintage model, and still we see the shadow of New Coke, the trendy contender that recently attempted to consign it to a bygone age. The ad becomes less a celebration of generational bridges than a reminder of our deeply chaotic universe, where even the nexus of our very reality - The Real Thing - is subject to the occasional rearrangement.
No comments:
Post a Comment