10 Commercials That Changed Pop Culture Forever

4. Levi's - "The Stranger"

All 1970s commercials have a weird feel to them when we watch them today, but Levi's commercials of the time must have been weird even then. The advertising executives at Levi's have always seemed to try harder than any other company to keep up with trends of the time, and, at times during the '70s, this produced some eerie results. This commercial is a prime example. The commercial tells the story of a mysterious stranger who walks into a small town populated by gray, ghost-like people. The stranger informs the town's citizens, as his face melts and changes in an LSD-inspired animation, that his flashy bell-bottoms are Levi's and that he's come to change the citizens' lives by giving them new trousers. The stranger proceeds to carry this out by pointing at members of the crowd, turning them from gray to colorful and giving them all kinds of different designs and styles of trousers. The citizenry, overjoyed by their new drawers, plead that the stranger stay in their town. The stranger declines, stating that it's his duty to walk the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu (as Jules Winfield would say), going from one town to another, livening the residents' lives as he introduces them to the wonder that is Levi's then-new line of Dacron polyester pants. The commercial's obviously meant to have an creepy feel, and it achieves that effect magnificently through Ken Nordine's ominous voice-over and the minimalist sci-fi style soundtrack. However, most of the commercial's strength comes from its mythic premise, one that we've seen in many a western and martial-arts flick: a stranger comes to a town and finds it in jeopardy; he redeems the town and moves on to the next. The last line of that last paragraph probably sounds like over-analyzing babble, but that's the first thing that came to mind when I watched this ad. I promise.