Someone on Reddit turned up this 1980s Motorola ad, and it's absolutely wonderful. How much do I love it? Let me count the ways:

 

 

Why so serious, Motorola? Somehow, the narrator's ponderous, overly-serious voice only makes the whole thing seem sillier. I suppose they decided that if they wanted to try and convince people of something that seemed as ludicrous as "cell phones will one day take over the world," they had better use the most serious voice-over ever. But in reality, it just makes it seem like an ad for Gray Poupon. Particularly the shots with the classy expensive cars being driven by white-haired white guys dialing their big-ass car phones!

 

 

You can probably still buy a car phone. I remember working in the call center for a wireless service in the early 1990s, and even then, it was somewhat historical when someone called in for a problem on a car phone. Back in the day, cell phones required so much power that they had to be attached to an automobile in order to suck the juice out of the battery. As soon as we developed batteries small enough to be carried around by hand, people abandoned the idea of car phones in droves.

 

And not just because they were incredibly unsafe, either. A car phone combined the worst aspects of both land lines and cell phones. It was basically a land line where you couldn't go pour yourself a cup of coffee while you were talking on the phone. Or a cell phone except you couldn't get out of the car.

 

 

Lady, if you're going to whip out that two-pound monstrosity over dinner, at least have the grace to look apologetic about it.

 

 

Just look at them! Actually I don't think it's that they were jerks, I think it's more that we celebrated jerks as aspirational figures. But that doesn't keep me from wanting to slap every single person in this ad, including the construction workers.

 

 

Or programming on an el-ec-tronic computer! Imagine that! 

 

(Look at that watch, though! I have a real case of Watch Envy right now. And I haven't worn a watch for… I don't know, at least a decade. But it's so clunky! With the square buttons! And the blocky display! LUST.)