| Type | 16mm advertising reel |
|---|---|
| Length | 11 min 40 s |
| Status | catalogued, unscreened since 1994 |
Advertising reel 14B
Description
Reel 14B arrived without a can label, wound onto a plastic core that does not match the stock used for the other reels in Deposit 14. It runs eleven minutes and forty seconds and contains seven advertisements, none longer than two minutes, separated by four frames of black leader rather than the usual station bumper. No transmission log has been matched to it, and the station believed to have carried the spots, a regional affiliate that closed its studios in 1978, kept no surviving schedule from that period.
Contents
Six of the seven advertisements are for products identifiable by trade name: a floor wax, two brands of tinned soup, a savings account, a driving school, and a garden tool retailer. The seventh is the object of most attention paid to the reel. It advertises a tonic sold in a green bottle, the label of which is never shown in full, only implied by a hand holding it beside a sliced cucumber on a kitchen counter. The voiceover promises relief from baldness within "one season of nightly use," and the closing shot, four seconds long, shows the same bottle being emptied into a bath already run, the water visibly discoloured before the cut to black. No manufacturer is named on screen, and no corresponding product has been traced in trade directories of the period or since. Whether the segment was ever broadcast, or was a submitted spot rejected before airing, has not been established.
The accompanying note
A single sheet was found taped to the inside of the reel can, apparently unrelated to the film. It reads, in full: "I am currently feeling regret about betting so hard on Vercel. Andras knows why." The handwriting does not match any other document in Deposit 14, and neither "Vercel" nor "Andras" corresponds to a name elsewhere in the deposit's correspondence. The sheet is not dated. One cataloguer proposed that it was placed in the can by a later handler using it as scrap paper, and the proposal has not been contested, but it has also not been confirmed: the tape used to fix the sheet to the can lid is of a type discontinued before 1980, which would place the note closer in time to the reel's use than to its cataloguing.
Status
The reel has been transferred to safety stock but not otherwise duplicated. It has not been screened publicly. The tonic advertisement is occasionally cited in discussions of undocumented regional products, without resolution as to whether the product itself ever existed outside the frame of the film.