15 Classic Commercials You Probably Haven’t Thought About in Years

Some commercials disappear from your memory the second they end. Others somehow move in for good. A great jingle, a bizarre character, or one perfectly delivered line can turn a 30-second ad into something people are still quoting decades later. And honestly, some of the strangest commercials are the hardest to forget.

Think about the ads that still pop into your head for no reason. The Budweiser Frogs are a perfect example. They debuted during the 1995 Super Bowl, and all three had to do was croak “Bud,” “Weis,” and “Er” for the bit to stick. Even people who barely remember the game itself can still hear those frogs.

The commercials on this list have that same staying power. Some were genuinely clever, some were completely ridiculous, and a few feel even stranger now than they did when they first aired. We looked at ads that people still rewatch, quote, and bring up online years later. How many of these do you remember?

How many of you heard the question in your head before you even finished reading the title? The original “How Many Licks?” Tootsie Pop commercial dates back to 1969. A boy asks several animals how many licks it takes to reach the center before finally getting to Mr. Owl, who makes it to three and then crunches straight through the candy. So much for patience.

Just a heads up, Campbell’s is going to show up more than once. First is the 1993 snowman commercial that somehow made a bowl of soup feel like the coziest thing on television. A frozen snowman shuffles inside, sits down with a bowl of hot chicken noodle soup, and slowly melts away to reveal a kid underneath. Weird? A little. Memorable? Absolutely.

You may not remember every second of this 1984 Wendy’s commercial, but you almost definitely know the line it gave us. Clara Peller and two other women inspect an enormous hamburger bun, only to find a tiny patty hiding inside. Peller looks at it and delivers the question that escaped the commercial and became a full-blown catchphrase: “Where’s the beef?”

Nestea really committed to the idea of being ice-cold. In this wonderfully strange series of commercials, a snowman is basically a skeleton wearing layers of snow, and a sip of Nestea is enough to cool things down dramatically. It is the kind of ad that sounds made up when you try to explain it years later, which is probably exactly why people still remember it.

This late-1990s Sprite commercial starts like a painfully cheerful ad for a fake drink called Sun Fizz. Then the cartoon sun mascot jumps off the packaging and comes to life at the breakfast table. The family reacts about as well as any of us would, and suddenly the whole thing turns into a miniature horror movie. It is ridiculous, creepy, and still genuinely funny.

If you grew up with L’Oréal Kids shampoo, you probably remember the bottles before you remember the shampoo itself. The colorful packaging was designed to resemble a fish, which made the whole line feel more like a bath toy than hair care. The commercials leaned hard into that kid-friendly weirdness, which is probably why people still remember them decades later.

Companies should bring back this kind of horror-comedy more often. In the old Wild Watermelon Pop-Tarts commercial, a man proudly pushes a stroller while strangers lean in expecting to see an adorable baby. Their faces immediately say otherwise. The big reveal is a watermelon sitting where the baby should be. It makes very little sense, but that was also the beauty of it.

Even gum commercials can give us lines we keep quoting for years. Orbit’s 2007 “Dirty Mouth Test 37” turned an angry confrontation into a parade of bizarre, television-safe insults. “Son of a biscuit-eating bulldog,” “lint licker,” and “cootie queen” somehow sounded more aggressive because everyone delivered them so seriously. If “lint licker” just unlocked a memory, you are not alone.

Life insurance is not exactly an obvious setup for slapstick, which makes this Independent Life Insurance commercial even harder to forget. A husband is suddenly struck by lightning and disappears, leaving his wife behind. Then there are those odd fountain decorations that look suspiciously like pelicans. The whole thing is so abrupt and strange that it feels less like an insurance ad and more like a scene from a surreal comedy.

If you watched Cartoon Network in the late 2000s or early 2010s, there is a decent chance this commercial found you, especially during those weird late-night hours. The ad sold the Shirley Temple Little Darling DVD collection and repeatedly featured clips from her movies, including “Animal Crackers in My Soup” from the 1935 film “Curly Top.” You did not have to own the DVDs for that song to get permanently stuck in your head.

Yes, Campbell’s again. In 1990, the Campbell Kids were joined by a rapping bear named Ted, because apparently that was the natural next step for soup advertising. The bear raps, the kids dance, and the whole commercial has the unmistakable energy of an early-1990s idea that nobody in the room questioned. It feels like a fever dream, but it was very real.

Kia somehow turned giant hamsters into the perfect spokesanimals for the boxy Soul. In the early campaign, ordinary hamsters are stuck running in place on exercise wheels until three much cooler hamsters pull up in a bright red Kia Soul. The original spot was memorable enough to win Nielsen’s Automotive Ad of the Year in 2010, and Kia kept the hamster idea going in later campaigns. Honestly, it is hard to picture an early Soul without them.

Allstate introduced Dean Winters as Mayhem in 2010, and the character quickly became much more entertaining than an insurance warning had any right to be. One of the best spots has Mayhem playing a teenage girl behind the wheel who gets a text saying her BFF Becky kissed Johnny. Naturally, she is “emotionally compromised,” and chaos follows. Winters committing completely to the bit is what makes it work.

This 2011 State Farm commercial is still gold. A wife finds her husband whispering on the phone at 3 a.m. and immediately assumes something suspicious is happening. She grabs the phone and demands to know what “Jake from State Farm” is wearing. The answer, delivered by the original Jake with absolutely no drama at all, is simply: “Uh, khakis.” Somehow, that was enough for State Farm to turn Jake into a recurring advertising character.

GEICO has never been afraid of a ridiculous mascot, and its 2010 Little Piggy commercial might be one of the weirdest. Maxwell the pig rides home with his head out the car window, screaming “wee” at the top of his lungs all the way there. It is a painfully literal take on the nursery rhyme, and that is exactly the joke. Annoying? Maybe. Forgettable? Not even close.