7 ms·

“Blown Away Guy”: Iconic music image

140 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

jordemort 4y ago
As a teenager, I had a modified version of this hanging on my room; someone had added a yawning cat on top of the speaker, and re-captioned it "Tuna Breath." Back in my day we walked uphill to school both ways in the snow and bought our memes on paper at Spencer's Gifts.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  That cat thing is brill. Thanks for starting my day with a major larf.
mark-r 4y ago
As soon as I saw the title of this post, I knew it was going to be about this ad. So iconic and well done.
zh3 4y ago
As a Bauhaus fan, reading the article was "Eh? It was Peter Murphy" - and then I found it was a different ad in the UK.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  nice save at :25
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZUIxGJ-ykI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZUIxGJ-ykI
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Was that the actual ad? It's not nearly as impressive is it? It just looks like some random clip of a music video. It just doesn't have the same sense of the commotion is caused by the tape to me.
    - rufus_foreman 4y ago
      Not as good as the American version. Which seems to be a recurring theme.
dylan604 4y ago
Oh man, the embedded youtube clip of the spot is priceless in the fact that there is an hiss so dominate in the audio just as if I was listening to one of the discussed Maxell tapes! It had me looking for the NR button.
- danachow 4y ago
  Even with a standard bias tape, with a halfway non shitty deck one could do a little bit better than that though. Linear VHS audio which this clearly is (on an aged tape) has especially bad SNR and response, much worse than a compact cassette. On the other hand, HiFi VHS audio for a time was basically practically the best at home recordable audio format (reel to reel was cool but quite a bit less common). I’m not sure what speed that tape is running at but I’m going to guess LP, + the effects of age +/- dirty tape heads — someone with too much time on their hands could analyze it and figure it out. It looks like the original ad was shot on 16mm film.
  - omginternets 4y ago
    What’s NR and SNR?
    - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
      noise reduction and signal to noise ratio, presumably.
    - mh- 4y ago
      NR = Noise Reduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_reduction
    - danachow 4y ago
      NR is noise reduction. It’s the thing that made Dolby a household name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system SNR is signal to noise ratio.
omginternets 4y ago
All these years I thought the company name was Maxwell, not Maxell. I can’t be the only one…
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yboris 4y ago
  Internet Comment Etiquette - 'Mandela Effect' ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6cOkZbWZME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6cOkZbWZME
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dqpb 4y ago
  Other timeline
- ohyoutravel 4y ago
  Wow no joke I used their cassette and vhs tapes extensively as a child and this is the first moment I realized it was not “Maxwell.”
- glouwbug 4y ago
  Berenstain Bears
  - omginternets 4y ago
    Exactly!
rogual 4y ago
Also referenced in the Simpsons: https://tenor.com/view/milhouse-simpsons-tv-blasting-thrillhouse-gif-4484562 https://tenor.com/view/milhouse-simpsons-tv-blasting-thrillh...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Gunax 4y ago
I had not seen this before, but I have seen many parodies of it which retrospectively make sense. I found this collection of some of them: https://youtu.be/hmmcgSgt5_c https://youtu.be/hmmcgSgt5_c When i was a kid, we used to call these 'Simpsons moments' referring to the feeling of seeing the parody before the original. As the Simpsons has many cultural references, but is also popular with kids, many of us who grew up watching it had various 'now I get it' moments. What's interesting is that's it's not obvious that there is a parody or reference at all if one is not familiar. I remember the Simpsons having terminator, 2001, and many other film references that I would have an aha moment years later when i finally understood it.
numbers 4y ago
I've been looking for this for a long time but couldn't put a good description to it since I saw it as a kid.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
My memories are very fuzzy but I feel like Maxell tapes lived up to the hype and they were better than the usual dreck I had. I’d put my “good stuff” on any Maxell I could find.
Terry_Roll 4y ago
The Blown Away Guy campaign did boost Maxell's sales as did their Israelites advert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clD6J9OmkJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clD6J9OmkJI) and The Skids (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gib916jJW1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gib916jJW1o), they were up against TDK at the time and to be honest the TDK audio cassettes probably just had it. Sticking with an Audiophile theme, I was surprised to learn its 50yrs of the Technic's SL 1200!?! https://www.technics.com/global/home/sl1200/50th-anniversary.html https://www.technics.com/global/home/sl1200/50th-anniversary... In the UK in the early 90's you couldn't get these for love nor money, not A stock, not B stock, not C stock because of the Rave/Acid house culture taking off (along with the de'rigueur Stanton cartridge), which is why this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg) will bring back some massive grins for some people! You know who you are! ;)
- thunderbong 4y ago
  Your last link is incorrect
  - Terry_Roll 4y ago
    I dont understand?
    - TacticalCoder 4y ago
      Bicep Glue is relatively recent. It's not from the early 90s: people may not realize they're showing images where insane rave parties took place. FWIW I've got the original version of Bicep Glue in my car as well as a one hour non-stop repetitive loop. I sometimes listen to that when driving. I love it.
      - Terry_Roll 4y ago
        > Bicep Glue is relatively recent. It's not from the early 90s: people may not realize they're showing images where insane rave parties took place. OIC, yeah, now whilst its not Helter Skelter, Fantazia or something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOMT3bRJXOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOMT3bRJXOo I think The Prodigy discography perhaps best mirrors the evolution of the music scene & mood in the UK through this time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSTBFZ-To2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSTBFZ-To2E What alot of people dont know is its probably MI5 we have to thank for Ecstasy and the US Army. So the US Army rediscovered it and the spooks flooded the country to stop the fighting on the football terraces (no seating back then) as depicted in films like Football factory, but MI5 will deny it as it also spawned the darker side like the film Essex Boys. The intro is the interesting bit here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931692/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931692/
drfuchs 4y ago
Blown-Away Guy may be the most iconic still image, but I'd say the most iconic moving image with sound was the commercial for Memorex cassette tape with Ella Fitzgerald and the "Is it Live, or is it Memorex?" tagline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeeuT3ciqpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeeuT3ciqpI It was so popular, there were various sequels.
- brewdad 4y ago
  I bought Maxell for all my cassette tape copying needs but "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" is what lives on in my memories today.
Kaibeezy 4y ago
The speaker has to be a JBL L100, right?
martyvis 4y ago
Maxwell may have won the tape print ad war, but TDK definitely buried this TV ad in my brain in the 80's. (I think the singer is Aussie, so I wonder if this was also a global commercial). https://youtu.be/W_cH8Wi0Ggo https://youtu.be/W_cH8Wi0Ggo
pfarrell 4y ago
Another contemporary parody I remember is from the comic Bloom County. https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2009/07/27/ https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2009/07/27/ (Don’t be fooled by the url date, that’s just the date gocomics reran it)
hedora 4y ago
So, did the makeup guy get paid?
aasasd 4y ago
Forget ‘blown away’, get a load of these three guys and Big Jay McNeely: https://i.imgur.com/iUQ6hHO.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/iUQ6hHO.jpeg
KennyBlanken 4y ago
So we're doing random blogspam now?
- tomcam 4y ago
  How is that random blogspam?
post_break 4y ago
My favorite cosplay of this was when Ryan Dunn dressed up as him and they used a fighter jet to blast him with 200C air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEFx1qmW4ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEFx1qmW4ts
throwawayboise 4y ago
I saw "Blown Away Guy" in the thread title and immediately that image came to mind. It was a very popular dorm room poster when I was in college.
Thorrez 4y ago
The image in the ad is great. But that has to be the worst kerning I've ever seen. It's so bad I'm not even sure it can be considered kerning. Maybe someone just added a few spaces in between "high fidelity" and "tape" for no apparent reason?
- avhon1 4y ago
  My guess is that the image was intended to be displayed as a full-spread advertisement in a magazine, and the extra space in the middle makes the words appear the correct distance apart when viewed on bound pages.
  - Thorrez 4y ago
    Oh, thanks! And the ad was designed so that none of the important parts of the picture are in the horizontal center.
- initplus 4y ago
  The ad would have been originally printed across two pages in a magazine.
- synu 4y ago
  It isn’t kerning, it’s the space for the page binding in the magazine this was printed in.

140 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

As a teenager, I had a modified version of this hanging on my room; someone had added a yawning cat on top of the speaker, and re-captioned it "Tuna Breath." Back in my day we walked uphill to school both ways in the snow and bought our memes on paper at Spencer's Gifts.

zasdffaa 4y ago
That cat thing is brill. Thanks for starting my day with a major larf.

mark-r 4y ago

As soon as I saw the title of this post, I knew it was going to be about this ad. So iconic and well done.

zh3 4y ago

As a Bauhaus fan, reading the article was "Eh? It was Peter Murphy" - and then I found it was a different ad in the UK.

smegsicle 4y ago
nice save at :25
rufus_foreman 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZUIxGJ-ykI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZUIxGJ-ykI
- dylan604 4y ago
  Was that the actual ad? It's not nearly as impressive is it? It just looks like some random clip of a music video. It just doesn't have the same sense of the commotion is caused by the tape to me.
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    Not as good as the American version. Which seems to be a recurring theme.

dylan604 4y ago

Oh man, the embedded youtube clip of the spot is priceless in the fact that there is an hiss so dominate in the audio just as if I was listening to one of the discussed Maxell tapes! It had me looking for the NR button.

danachow 4y ago
Even with a standard bias tape, with a halfway non shitty deck one could do a little bit better than that though. Linear VHS audio which this clearly is (on an aged tape) has especially bad SNR and response, much worse than a compact cassette. On the other hand, HiFi VHS audio for a time was basically practically the best at home recordable audio format (reel to reel was cool but quite a bit less common). I’m not sure what speed that tape is running at but I’m going to guess LP, + the effects of age +/- dirty tape heads — someone with too much time on their hands could analyze it and figure it out. It looks like the original ad was shot on 16mm film.
- omginternets 4y ago
  What’s NR and SNR?
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    noise reduction and signal to noise ratio, presumably.
  - mh- 4y ago
    NR = Noise Reduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_reduction
  - danachow 4y ago
    NR is noise reduction. It’s the thing that made Dolby a household name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise-reduction_system SNR is signal to noise ratio.

omginternets 4y ago

All these years I thought the company name was Maxwell, not Maxell. I can’t be the only one…

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yboris 4y ago
Internet Comment Etiquette - 'Mandela Effect' ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6cOkZbWZME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6cOkZbWZME
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dqpb 4y ago
Other timeline
ohyoutravel 4y ago
Wow no joke I used their cassette and vhs tapes extensively as a child and this is the first moment I realized it was not “Maxwell.”
glouwbug 4y ago
Berenstain Bears
- omginternets 4y ago
  Exactly!

rogual 4y ago

Also referenced in the Simpsons: https://tenor.com/view/milhouse-simpsons-tv-blasting-thrillhouse-gif-4484562 https://tenor.com/view/milhouse-simpsons-tv-blasting-thrillh...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Gunax 4y ago

I had not seen this before, but I have seen many parodies of it which retrospectively make sense. I found this collection of some of them: https://youtu.be/hmmcgSgt5_c https://youtu.be/hmmcgSgt5_c When i was a kid, we used to call these 'Simpsons moments' referring to the feeling of seeing the parody before the original. As the Simpsons has many cultural references, but is also popular with kids, many of us who grew up watching it had various 'now I get it' moments. What's interesting is that's it's not obvious that there is a parody or reference at all if one is not familiar. I remember the Simpsons having terminator, 2001, and many other film references that I would have an aha moment years later when i finally understood it.

numbers 4y ago

I've been looking for this for a long time but couldn't put a good description to it since I saw it as a kid.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

My memories are very fuzzy but I feel like Maxell tapes lived up to the hype and they were better than the usual dreck I had. I’d put my “good stuff” on any Maxell I could find.

Terry_Roll 4y ago

The Blown Away Guy campaign did boost Maxell's sales as did their Israelites advert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clD6J9OmkJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clD6J9OmkJI) and The Skids (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gib916jJW1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gib916jJW1o), they were up against TDK at the time and to be honest the TDK audio cassettes probably just had it. Sticking with an Audiophile theme, I was surprised to learn its 50yrs of the Technic's SL 1200!?! https://www.technics.com/global/home/sl1200/50th-anniversary.html https://www.technics.com/global/home/sl1200/50th-anniversary... In the UK in the early 90's you couldn't get these for love nor money, not A stock, not B stock, not C stock because of the Rave/Acid house culture taking off (along with the de'rigueur Stanton cartridge), which is why this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ZxRs45tTg) will bring back some massive grins for some people! You know who you are! ;)

thunderbong 4y ago
Your last link is incorrect
- Terry_Roll 4y ago
  I dont understand?
  - TacticalCoder 4y ago
    Bicep Glue is relatively recent. It's not from the early 90s: people may not realize they're showing images where insane rave parties took place. FWIW I've got the original version of Bicep Glue in my car as well as a one hour non-stop repetitive loop. I sometimes listen to that when driving. I love it.
    - Terry_Roll 4y ago
      > Bicep Glue is relatively recent. It's not from the early 90s: people may not realize they're showing images where insane rave parties took place. OIC, yeah, now whilst its not Helter Skelter, Fantazia or something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOMT3bRJXOo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOMT3bRJXOo I think The Prodigy discography perhaps best mirrors the evolution of the music scene & mood in the UK through this time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSTBFZ-To2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSTBFZ-To2E What alot of people dont know is its probably MI5 we have to thank for Ecstasy and the US Army. So the US Army rediscovered it and the spooks flooded the country to stop the fighting on the football terraces (no seating back then) as depicted in films like Football factory, but MI5 will deny it as it also spawned the darker side like the film Essex Boys. The intro is the interesting bit here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931692/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931692/

drfuchs 4y ago

Blown-Away Guy may be the most iconic still image, but I'd say the most iconic moving image with sound was the commercial for Memorex cassette tape with Ella Fitzgerald and the "Is it Live, or is it Memorex?" tagline: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeeuT3ciqpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeeuT3ciqpI It was so popular, there were various sequels.

brewdad 4y ago
I bought Maxell for all my cassette tape copying needs but "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" is what lives on in my memories today.

Kaibeezy 4y ago

The speaker has to be a JBL L100, right?

martyvis 4y ago

Maxwell may have won the tape print ad war, but TDK definitely buried this TV ad in my brain in the 80's. (I think the singer is Aussie, so I wonder if this was also a global commercial). https://youtu.be/W_cH8Wi0Ggo https://youtu.be/W_cH8Wi0Ggo

pfarrell 4y ago

Another contemporary parody I remember is from the comic Bloom County. https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2009/07/27/ https://www.gocomics.com/bloomcounty/2009/07/27/ (Don’t be fooled by the url date, that’s just the date gocomics reran it)

hedora 4y ago

So, did the makeup guy get paid?

aasasd 4y ago

Forget ‘blown away’, get a load of these three guys and Big Jay McNeely: https://i.imgur.com/iUQ6hHO.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/iUQ6hHO.jpeg

KennyBlanken 4y ago

So we're doing random blogspam now?

tomcam 4y ago
How is that random blogspam?

post_break 4y ago

My favorite cosplay of this was when Ryan Dunn dressed up as him and they used a fighter jet to blast him with 200C air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEFx1qmW4ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEFx1qmW4ts

throwawayboise 4y ago

I saw "Blown Away Guy" in the thread title and immediately that image came to mind. It was a very popular dorm room poster when I was in college.

Thorrez 4y ago

The image in the ad is great. But that has to be the worst kerning I've ever seen. It's so bad I'm not even sure it can be considered kerning. Maybe someone just added a few spaces in between "high fidelity" and "tape" for no apparent reason?

avhon1 4y ago
My guess is that the image was intended to be displayed as a full-spread advertisement in a magazine, and the extra space in the middle makes the words appear the correct distance apart when viewed on bound pages.
- Thorrez 4y ago
  Oh, thanks! And the ad was designed so that none of the important parts of the picture are in the horizontal center.
initplus 4y ago
The ad would have been originally printed across two pages in a magazine.
synu 4y ago
It isn’t kerning, it’s the space for the page binding in the magazine this was printed in.