STILL SHINING 36 YEARS LATER
SO, YOU ASK, JUST WHO ARE THE STARS BEHIND EAT'N PARK'S CHRISTMAS TREE COMMERCIAL?
Many Pittsburghers’ favorite holiday TV special is 30 seconds long and depicts an animated Christmas tree bending down to lift up, with its top, a struggling star.
Yep: The Eat’n Park “Christmas Star” commercial.
It’s sweet and short — starting with a few notes of pan flute, swelling into strings music and ending with the tree and star bursting into light and the line, “We hope the special lift you get this holiday season lasts all year long.” But it has lasted for a stunning run of 36 years, having been created back in 1982 and airing every holiday season since, starting during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
A reader, remarking, “It was brilliant and stands the test of time!” asked the Post-Gazette, Who made it?
As is well-documented by the restaurant chain and others, the commercial was the trial-and-error, still-almost-killed creation of two rookie employees at the Ketchum ad agency: art director Craig Otto and copy writer Cathy Bowen.
Eat’n Park’s then CEO Jim Broadhurst wanted a video Christmas card to Pittsburgh — “something,” he later told the Post-Gazette, “that’s not going to promote a product” — that would last for 20 years. No pressure.
Fast-forward to this past Nov. 24, when the chain tweeted the clip, noting, “It’s not officially the Christmas season until you’ve seen our beloved Christmas Star commercial! So without further ado ...”
The commercial now is older than some of its fans. It lasted longer than Ketchum’s Pittsburgh office.
Its co-creators went onto other firms and other jobs.
Mr. Otto, 59, now lives in Bellevue and works for the Downtown-based marketing firm Elliance, where he is director of brand development. But he loves talking about the first commercial he ever made — and the best.
It wasn’t, he recalls, the biggest job, dollarwise, which is why he and Ms. Bowen got it. But it was a big challenge. After what they thought was their best idea was shot down, they were depressed, and drinking, with a deadline looming. They happened to both wander into the office one Sunday. He was doodling with a star and wondering if there was a story in how it got on the tree. She told him, “I think we can work with that.”
And it was a lot of work, for him to roughly storyboard (“For the life of me, I wish to God I’d hung onto that storyboard!”), for her to so subtly write. And there was much more to it than that.
A team of people hand drew the pencil drawings and 720 acetate cels that became the animation. That was at New York City’s Ovation Films, which they chose because of the painterly style they wanted. Mr. Otto recalls owner Art Petricone advising him to keep it simple and classic.
Last week, he found and called a retired Mr. Petricone at home in Piermont, N.Y., and told him that ad still was airing. Mr. Petricone says he was “absolutely amazed . ... And then I saw it. It’s the simplicity.”
Mr. Otto recalls a lead animator but didn’t remember her name. He also knows that there are people who claim credit for doing that who did not. After reading this story online on Wednesday, Joe Wos, local cartoonist and founder of the late ToonSeum, contacted this reporter to set the record straight: He said it was Nancy Beiman, a veteran animator now teaching at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada. He’d already taken to social media.
Responding to Mr. Wos’ Facebook posts, Ms. Beiman confirmed that she was sole animator on the spot, which has been “on my reel since 1982,” but she’s used to animators not getting credit on
commercials. Reached Thursday morning by the Post-Gazette, she elaborated how, as a freelancer at Ovation, she gave life to star and tree.
“Here is something that most people don’t know about the commercial, but it becomes obvious when you see it,” she wrote in an email. “My original tree animation was slightly modified in the ‘cleanup,’ but they did not check the effects level of lights (which I also animated.) The client wanted the final tree a bit smaller. So some of the lights flicker outside the outline of the tree.”
Then she posted on Facebook: “I am apparently kind of a big deal in Pittsburgh.”
Mr. Otto is tickled to know and says, “She deserves a lot of credit.”
He knows who did the original score: Walt Woodward, who ran the Perfect Pitch jingle agency in Cleveland. He says that Mr. Woodward told him he should quit advertising because he’d never do another spot so good.
Mr. Woodward remembers that. He’s now Connecticut’s state historian and associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and he says the “Christmas Star” is still one of his favorite commercials.
Mr. Otto notes that he and Ms. Bowen entered it in the 1982 national Clio Awards, in the super-competitive national retail food category, and earned a finalist certificate. The commercial that won: Wendy’s Clara Peller debuting, “Where’s the beef?”
Ms. Bowen still works in Pittsburgh, too, as creative director for Smith Brothers Agency, North Shore. As this story adds to the friends who bring up her first commercial to her every year, she laughs. She has done other good work. But this bit has done what we now would call “gone viral” in a way that doesn’t wear off but is tough to repeat. Though, if given the chance to reimagine it with Mr. Otto, she, too, is there.
“I don’t know,” she says. “At the time, it was a lucky coming together of a lot of different things.”
Nobody could have known how “crazy” long it would last. But people knew it was good, and it gave both of its creators a boost to their early careers. Says Mr. Otto, “Everybody who ever saw it along the way, even in production, was really complimentary. They thought the name ‘Eat’n Park’ was weird.”
(The animator, Ms. Beiman, says, “I was amused by the name of the restaurant and joked that I hoped that people parked first, before they ate.”)
The commercial was celebrated on its 30th anniversary with a laser version performed as part of Light Up Night in 2012, when the company offered customers the chance to send it on personalized e-cards and buy limited-edition Christmas Star ornaments, magnets, mugs, T-shirts and even cookies, with 10 percent of proceeds going to its annual Caring for Kids Campaign.
The Christmas Star ecards and merchandise are back this season, and so is the annual listing of the times and dates that the ad will run, through Christmas morning, with an embedded YouTube video “to watch it now!”
New this year: Dec. 6 was Christmas Star Day, when guests at the restaurants could decorate a Smiley Cookie and do other activities that benefit children’s hospitals. If Eat’n Park gets 10,000 shares of a related Facebook page, it will donate an additional $10,000 to the Caring for Kids Campaign.
The commercial is all over the internet, having been celebrated by Pittsburgh Dad (“It ain’t Christmas until I seen the Eat’n Park ‘Christmas Star’ commercial”) and lovingly spoofed by Benstonium.com (the star is a Baltimore Ravens or a Philadelphia Flyers or Columbus Blue Jackets logo that the tree sportingly disses). At least one pastor used it for his homily. Last year, a local fangirl turned it into her Halloween costume.
The video itself remains little changed, except when the voiceover was redone by that of the late local broadcaster and Pittsburgh Advertising Hall of Famer Bob Trow and tweaked, from “Merry Christmas ...” to “Happy holidays from Eat’n Park.” And the logo was updated.
New by next week: A version that will look better in modern widescreen format that is currently being tested.
Eat’n Park’s Kevin O’Connell says any changes are made very carefully. “We’re very protective of it,” he says. “The fact that it’s vintage is key to its success.”