The Jesters

[MerryWanna]

Watching this short again I found myself thinking the Jesters were actually pretty nifty. 

You just don't see stuff like this in advertising anymore.  For one thing, they actually weren't half bad as singers.  Bad harmonizing grates on my ears like a pavement saw hitting a sewage pipe, but these guys were good. (Nitpick: They should have tried a little harder to sound like different people when singing as "the boys from the Golden West", p'rhaps...and Mrs. Newlywed was everything the Jesters weren't: she was just freaking awful, almost enough of a vocal annoyance to offset their talent...but hey, it was just a bloody advert for pork.  Can't have everything be perfect.) 

I am not sure what sort of audience would have been viewing this - it seems long for a TV commercial, and though I cannot find a date on it, I think around that time television would have all been live (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here) so my conclusion is that it must have shown at movie theatres during intermissions and between feature films.

I think advertising of this sort is charmingly honest and simple - and it's a shame that nowadays adverts are all about psychology and demographics and market research.  Here, we had a mildly entertaining skit that actually taught me something about how to cook!*  My favourite riff, therefore, was "If I were a Jester, I'd want to be the one who made the salad.  He's the 'thinking man's Jester'..."

When's the last time you learned something from a modern advert? Or "post-modern" advert? (I have no clue what the difference between "modern" and "post-modern" is, even after reading a whole lot of crap about this very subject in college.)

I tried Googling these guys and came up with a doo-wop group having that name from around that time...but they all turned out to be black.  Guess those were different Jesters. Anyone else know anything else about whether or not these guys did anything else with their barbershop trio besides this one pork advert?

*Too bad pork has such uhm...unpleasant gastrointestinal effects on me - ones that also are unpleasant to anyone around me with a nose - for an hour or two after eating it.  Maybe one day I will just say the hell with it and try that recipe anyway - it does look tasty...

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I did a lot of searching when this came out and couldn't find anything about this trio.  This thing was from 1939 or 1940.  Squire's was a big pork packing company in the Cambridge/Arlington area of Boston.

There's a trio from the late 40's early 50's called "the three jesters", one of the voices sounds similar but the other 2 are very different.

[MerryWanna]

I did a lot of searching when this came out and couldn't find anything about this trio.  This thing was from 1939 or 1940.  Squire's was a big pork packing company in the Cambridge/Arlington area of Boston.

There's a trio from the late 40's early 50's called "the three jesters", one of the voices sounds similar but the other 2 are very different.

Thanks for your answer.  Today's advertisers could learn a lot from their ancestor's generation.  If the idea of a commercial is to sell a product this really worked for me - I began fondly remembering how much I enjoyed my mother's pork chops.  I haven't eaten a pork product in over 20 years.

[mstgator]

Here we go... Joel Whitburn's "Pop Memories" lists a trio called The Jesters who scored four pop chart hits on Decca from 1940 to 1945.  Membership is listed as Red Latham, Wamp Carlson, and Guy Bonham.  IMDb lists this entry for Walter "Wamp" Carlson from New Britain, Connecticut:

The son of Swedish immigrants, Wamp Carlson, with fellow Nutmeggers Dwight "Red" Latham and Guy Bonham, formed a group called the "Tastyeast Jesters" who first performed singing commercials on radio for shows sponsored by the Green Brothers Company of Springfield, Mass., and Trenton, N.J., the makers of Tastyeast candy bars in 1930. Changing their name to "The Jesters", the group was best known for their novelty songs and snappy patter.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Those are the same 3 guys that I found later on called The Three Jesters.

I guess over 20 years their voices changed because the recordings I listened to of The Three Jesters from the late 40s seemed like one or 2 of the guys were different.

[MerryWanna]

Those are the same 3 guys that I found later on called The Three Jesters.

I guess over 20 years their voices changed because the recordings I listened to of The Three Jesters from the late 40s seemed like one or 2 of the guys were different.

I'd also assume it would be harder to judge voices from 1940s vinyl than it would be from audio products made even only twenty or thirty years later. But maybe I am talking out the back end of a horse, since I've never actually heard 1940s vinyl played in person.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Those are the same 3 guys that I found later on called The Three Jesters.

I guess over 20 years their voices changed because the recordings I listened to of The Three Jesters from the late 40s seemed like one or 2 of the guys were different.

I'd also assume it would be harder to judge voices from 1940s vinyl than it would be from audio products made even only twenty or thirty years later. But maybe I am talking out the back end of a horse, since I've never actually heard 1940s vinyl played in person.

Actually, there is a point there.  I was comparing the 78 record to the film short.  Because of the way film sound is recorded it is the best fidelity source for old music.  I don't think anything matched film until reel to reel tape came out (in the 50s?).  So the recording medium could make a difference.