A Magic TV “Commercial”!

While we were entertaining in Atlantic City, Minuteman Press wanted to present a 30-second television commercial locally to promote their high speed “color laser copier” when it was first introduced to the public and we were asked if we could design a “magical” commercial for them.

Carol Ann and I spent the next week tossing ideas back and forth. We developed three ideas — quick 30-second clips — interestingly enough, only one was designed with magic in mind.

The first concept started with a janitor late at night alone at the Louvre Museum in Paris who’s mop handle “accidentally” breaks through the painting of the “Mona Lisa”. He doesn’t know what to do, so he races into the curator’s office, finds a photo of the Mona Lisa in a book, races it over to Minuteman Press on his scooter and blows it up on the “color copier”. The next scene shows patrons gathered around the Mona Lisa all going “oooooh” while the janitor leans proudly on his mop!

The second idea for a commercial was a woman wallpapering her kitchen (coincidentally we were wallpapering our kitchen at the time). She is on the last strip of the last roll on the last wall and finds that the roll is 11 inches too short! She races the strip of wallpaper over to Minuteman Press, makes a color copy of the wallpaper, and in the last scene she proudly slaps the color copy against the wall — a perfect match!

The third idea involved a trick I had just developed where a jumbo playing card would appear inside of a picture frame in a huge flash of fire. We took that same trick, but instead of cards, we made “photos”, “real estate brochures” and “color flyers” appear in succession inside the frame all to an exciting narrated musical background. It was not my favorite idea, but admittedly, it was exciting and flashy and was the one that the company ended up choosing.

We shot the commercial and it ran locally for six months. It turns out that the commercial was even a bigger hit than we had anticipated and ended up winning a national award for “Best Television Commercial” for the printing industry!

. . . you just never know!