Then you need the Jack LaLanne Power Juicer!

Phuckd is quite a funny blog. Like me, phucker likes to take the piss out of awful late-night television, except he has a lot more exclamation marks. His latest target is the classic teleshopping presentation for Jack LaLanne’s Power Juicer.

I had never heard of Jack LaLanne before I saw this commercial. Apparently he was some kind of muscle man in the 1940s. The commercial had led me to believe that he was a singer or entertainer of some sort. At the end he starts singing, and it goes split screen. On the left we have footage from about fifty years ago of Jack LaLanne singing some kind of song. On the right we have today’s Jack LaLanne trying to sing the same song, but he is now so bad at it that the original footage is mauled to pieces to get the pair to stay in sync.

Anyway, the Power Juicer purports to be “whisper quiet”, but when they demonstrate it, it is patently not whisper quiet. In fact, the presenters need to shout over it. (Incidentally, there is an episode of The Simpsons that is clearly inspired by this “whisper quiet” moment.)

They then make a big deal about how you can put whole vegetables and fruit in, because obviously these days people are just too bastarding lazy to peel an orange before they make home made juice. Yes, that’s right. Fruit goes into the machine, complete with skin.

And then, when the process is over, a load of sloppy gloop comes out of its spout. To be honest, it looks as though it has already gone through the entire digestive process, so there is no need to drink it.

But they didn’t endure that shouty loud motor for nothing. So they take their wares to the local supermarket and feed some poor unsuspecting customers their shit-juice. Clearly, the participants have been told that whatever they actually think of the juice, they must say it’s delicious.

You see, what they don’t tell you in this commercial is the fact that Jack LaLanne actually thinks that all good food should taste shit, at least according to Wikipedia:

When interviewed by Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show, LaLanne declared that his two simple rules of nutrition are: “If man made it, don’t eat it; if it tastes good, spit it out.”

So there you have it. Jack LaLanne himself tries his juice and goes on about how great it tastes, but he doesn’t spit it out. Still, since bad food is good and good food is bad, all of our sense of taste has been twisted inside out so that we don’t know what to think any more. So what are we to make of these vox pops in the supermarket?

There’s a nonplussed youth connecting his mouth to some brown pulp. “Delicious,” he says, unconvincingly.
Here comes a family! Let’s get the six-year-old child to try it. That’ll be cute! “Delicious!”, she says.

So far, so lame. But the peak is just around the corner. The next guinea pig is some poor elderly woman who actually grimaces when she takes a swig. “That’s delicious,” she says, with an immense gurn that under any other circumstances would look as though it had been photoshopped.

It’s worth sitting through the whole thing just for that moment. So if you happen to be awake at about 1am this morning, do take a look. If Jack LaLanne isn’t on, you can console yourself by watching the advert for the Brenda DyGraf Lateral Thigh Trainer (it’s so good because — get this — not only do you move up and down, but you also move from side to side! Genius!).