History: the call letters WTBS used to belong to MIT's student radio station (before Ted Turner bought the call letters and it became WMBR). It broadcast at 88.1 megacycles (cycles, not Hertz--these were the old days!) with an effective radiated power of fourteen watts, and was educational and noncommercial. It also broadcast the same programs to the dorms via short-distance "carrier-current" AM. When commercials ran on the AM station, it was necessary to fill the time on the FM station, which traditionally was done with public service announcements. The following link has more information on the history of WMBR.
I decided it would be fun to run fake humorous commercials instead.
The name "Apple Gunkies" was the creation of Sue Lasdon and her friends at Goucher. I borrowed (stole) it for the first Apple Gunkies ad. I also borrowed (stole) some ideas from Pohl and Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants" (the reference to Costa Rica and the "skilled native craftsmen with pride in their work." And, yes... I incorrectly used the word "rhomboid" when I should have said "parallelepiped."
I was at the time shy about the sound of my own voice so I had others read the commercials. Rory Johnson had what I thought was a wonderful, distinguished-sounding British voice, and he read the first ones. #1 was the very first Apple Gunkies ad ever to air. But I think it was less funny than many of the later ones.
"Apple Gunkies" were seized on and embroidered by many other WTBS staffers, and gave rise to other commercial parodies, such as Pete Samson's ads for "Digicomputronimation" and "Nocturnal Aviation."
Incidentally, the Free Software Foundation has a host named apple-gunkies; I have been unable to find out the story behind it.
Breathe Away Your Fat parodied a style heard in some of the stupider ads of the time. I'm afraid I've forgotten who the authoritative-sounding announcer was; Mark Green played the part of the witless echoer. Notice that it's over a minute long; originally all the Apple Gunkies ads were timed to run exactly one minute, but by the time we did this one Apple Gunkies were sort of a feature in themselves and didn't necessarily run opposite one-minute commercials. Xylol is a toxic and flammable solvent used by histologists to prepare slides; I was familiar with it from a summer job I had in a biology lab, which, come to think of it, dates this as 1965 or later.
When I sent Sue tapes of some of the earlier ads, she and some of her friends at Goucher created some more. I had a minor argument with some of the engineering staff on airing them, because they were made on a home tape recorder and "weren't broadcast-quality."
My Mom Feeds Me Gunkies is set to the noble chorale-like passage in the last movement of Brahms' First Symphony. Possibly suggested by an earlier Apple Gunkies I had done, set to a theme from Beethoven's Sixth.
Do we have to have doughnuts again for breakfast? Hey, Sue, are you there? Who was "Zorina?" Did that mean something or was it just a funny name? As the Gunkies mythos evolved, various properties and secret ingredients accumulated. I think I introduced "ATP." ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is found in all living things and is used for energy exchange at the subcellular level, so, if Apple Gunkies had been real, the statements that they contain ATP and that ATP "contains energy" would be, like many advertising claims, literally true but misleading...
Don't Flunk It--Gunk It! "Steinway and Heminbeck" How time flies... At that time, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck held very elevated ranks in the pantheon of American writers. Still on summer reading lists, I think, but fading fast.
--Dan Smith. Comments to dpbsmith999999999@world.std.com after removing nine 9's from the address.
Date created: 9/7/97 Last modified: 9/7/97