"That's the song I sing"

The difference between the Coca Cola jingle "Buy the World a Coke" and its spin-off "uncommercial" version "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" is apparent in the first line. Where the "uncommercial" version uses the word "build" (as in "I'd like to build the world a home"), the commercial version uses the word "buy".

I was a child when the first "Hilltop" Coke ad debuted -- nine years old in July 1971. Shortly after that, the New Seekers came out with the "uncommercial" version. I noted the difference.

This is how my nine-year-old mind worked: if one were to "buy the world" something, who would the seller be? Mars? Venus? But if one were to "build the world" something like a home, that would too much for one person, and you would never get it done, like the guy who spent his life building Vancouver's seawall (James Cunningham), and died trying. (The original version of the seawall was completed in September 1971, two months after the Coke ad hit the airwaves. The Stanley Park portion was completed in 1980.)

Christmas Tree

The market's conical mosaic.

The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

The Gods Must Be Crazy was an independent cinema mainstay upon its release, but I rarely hear it spoken of these days.

The "Hilltop Ad"

In yesterday's post I linked Coca Cola to an ad the company ran in July, 1971. Known as the "Hilltop Ad", it features a crowd of teenagers, dressed in clothes that signify where in the world they are from, gathered atop a hill in Italy and lip-synching to a song co-written by the advertising company Coca Cola had hired to accelerate sales of its brown drink. This one-minute song proved so popular amongst Americans that radio stations were besieged with requests to "play the ad."

I remember seeing the "Hilltop Ad" as a nine-year-old. And though I too was drawn to it, I could never understand why, when the camera pulls back to show those gathered, they are not in the shape of the world, only a third of it. Years later my mother, who used to sing this ad to us on car rides, told me that it was not the incomplete world-shape people talked about back then, but that it looked like the place from which babies are born.

Two Cokes

Above is Decio Pignatari's 1957 poem "beba coca cola"; at bottom, Robert Hollander's 1968 Norton Anthology mainstay.