AdFreak reported today that a Mexican brewery has begun manufacturing the “world’s first gay beers,” Purple Hand Beer and Salamandra. Well, I knew this was already factually incorrect. Not the “gay beer” part. The “first gay beer” part. Because everyone knows that the first “gay beer” was Schmitt’s Gay Beer, from the independent brewery of … the Saturday Night Live writers’ room. But gay beer is not the only SNL “product” that became real. Let’s take a look back, shall we?
One of the very first commercial parodies on SNL (ever!) was for the Triple Trac Razor Blade, which boasted “not just two blades in one system, but three stainless, platinum teflex-coated blades melded together to form one incredible shaving cartridge.” This was hilarious in 1975, when two blades were already a “crazy” amount of razor blades. But as we all know, the Gillette Mach 3 was created in the 1990s, followed by the Schick Quattro, which has four blades. The Triple Trac was created for the guy who would “believe anything.” So clearly, some guys still do.
In more recent years, Andy Samberg, as super-casual singer Jack Johnson, tried to sell us J.J. Casuals, “the shoes that look like feet”:
And while these particular shoes look exactly like (gigantic) feet, the ones that turned up in real life are a bit more stylized. But they are real. And they are the Vibram FiveFingers.
So, that totally happened.
And the last time Tina Fey hosted, she was in a “commercial” for the Duncan Hines’ Brownie Husband, created to “melt your heart while you eat his face”:
While this exact product has not been created, you can buy yourself a Chocolate Boyfriend. (And yes, we acknowledge that this probably predates the Brownie Husband.)
Then there was the commercial from 1990 for Bad Idea Jeans:
And then came Pajama Jeans. Okay, this is slightly different, but they’re a parody of jeans and they’re a bad idea. Really.
