Monday, June 29, 2009
News Billy Mays here!, for the last time.
Posted by Asher Smith on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 7:43 PM
Farah Fawcett's passing last Thursday prompted a generation of now-middle aged males to recall their frustrated adolescent fantasies. Michael Jackson's death, on Friday, nearly broke the internet. The equally untimely death of householder-appliance pitchman Billy Mays, who likely succumbed to heart disease, inspired an entirely different sort of reminiscence.
Mays already had almost 52,000 fans on Facebook, over 2,000 of whom have visited his page since then to pay their respects. (Condolences ranged from "NOW who will I buy useless shit from?" to "zorbies won't absorb my tears...and Mighty Mend-it can't fix my broken heart" to "why couldnt the sham-wow guy die.") Mays' death pushed Twitter into another day of overload, while on MySpace users were hawking Orange Glo as collector's items.
Though while the outbursts of sentiment following Fawcett and Jackson's untimely deaths were not at all surprising, the phrase "infomercial star" that all the obits are throwing around wouldn't even exist without Mays. So how to account for the impact of "the OxiClean guy" on the cultural zeitgeist?
To the Washington Post, who termed Mays "[perhaps the] single most ubiquitous figure on television today," he was "the opposite of slick," a guy who gave off the vibe of "your overcaffeinated buddy, dressed in Regular Joe casual." To the New York Times, "part of Mr. Mays’s appeal was his apparent conviction in the products he sold." (Mays gave away OxiClean to every one of the 300 guests at his wedding and reportedly broke into his TV pitch on the dance floor.)
The list of products Mays lent his face to is staggering: OxiClean, Orange Glo, Kaboom, ESPN 360, Impact Gel Insoles, Omni DualSaw, Soft Buns, the Samurai Shark, the Grater Plater, the 2008 Bowl Championship Series, and Mighty Putty. As Joe Holley noted, anyone who has ever had to work late at night is well-acquainted with Mays; children could recognize him as "the Awesome Auger man!" without having any clue what an auger, much less an awesome one, might be.
What really jumps out from all the Mays remebrances is the sheer degree of omnipresence that he managed to attain, so much so that one mourner on Facebook was able to unironically describe his grief thusly:
I feel like I just lost an uncle or something...
Now that's a level of adoration that your average tinhorn dictator would kill for.
(Photo courtesy of Sharese Ann Frederick)
like
dislike
Latest in Fresh Loaf
-
5 things today: KAWS, The Togas
A Culture Shock party at the High, garage rock at the Earl, and more
-
Town hall meeting on Ashford, er, Brookhaven… whatever 3
Someone has proposed turning DeKalb County into one big fat city
-
Ringling Bros. Circus kicks off tonight, but there's an elephant in the room 6
Or, tent, I suppose
- More »
