5 Strangest Products Pitched by Billy Mays
Everybody knows that Billy Mays is TV pitchman for OxiClean ("powered by the air we breathe!) and Kaboom ("tough on grime, easy on you") ... but wait, there's more! Did you know that the loud, bearded uber-salesman also pitched strange products like the Grater Plater and the Hercules Hook? (There's also the Green Now, a spray paint to paint your dead lawn green, but I couldn't find the video for it.)
In memory of Billy Mays, the king of infomercial, here are 5 of the strangest product he ever pitched:
The Grater Plater
What do you get when you combine a cheese grater and a plate? The plate that grates, of course, here's The Grater Plater. (The name alone is golden: Grater. Plater. Grater plater. Gotta love it!)
The Gopher
While my wife likes OxiClean, The Gopher is actually my favorite item Billy Mays had ever pitched (in the words of another late-night infomercial, "I'm not only a blogger, I'm also an infomercial customer!"). It just works well - many years later, I still use mine to grab things too high to reach (saves me from getting the step stool out).
Tool Band-It
The Tool Band-It is another in Billy May's long line of making a product out of two existing ones. This time, it's magnet + armband, to give you a magnetic arm band. Genius!
The AwesomeAuger
I distrust a $20 drill, but the idea behind the AwesomeAuger is pretty solid (I have a similar device - the drill bit alone cost me $20. It works well for boring holes in hard ground for small plants). The only thing that works better is The Garden Weasel's Garden Claw.
Hercules Hook
The Hercules Hook is in a class by itself: here, Billy Mays used his infomercial prowess to sell you a bent pin for hanging stuff on your wall. I myself am a nail-and-hammer kind of guy, but the Hercules Hook does work well (if you don't damage the drywall while you're pushing it in) though I wouldn't use it to hang shelves or anything like that ...
Billy Mays, RIP.
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Billy Mays Has Died
First it was David Carradine, then Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. Now, infomercial king Billy Mays is dead. Celebrities are dying left and right!
The 50-year-old known for his shouting OxiClean ads was pronounced dead at 7:45 a.m. The Hillborough County medical examiner will perform an autopsy, Tampa police Lt. Brian Dugan said.
Mays was on the US Airways flight from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Tampa on Saturday that had a hard landing at Tampa International Airport when the plane’s front tire blew out. There were no reported injuries on Flight 1241, US Airways told CNN.
According to a local Tampa TV station, Mays said: "All of a sudden as we hit you know it was just the hardest hit, all the things from the ceiling started dropping. It hit me on the head, but I got a hard head."
No words whether the a bump in the head, which caused the death of actress Natasha Richardson a couple of months ago, is also responsible for Billy May’s death. CNN has the news: Link
Previously on Neatorama: 5 Shocking Celebrity Deaths
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As seen on T.V.
My husband was sick last weekend – as in, up at 4 a.m. hugging the Porcelain Goddess sick (and not because of alcohol). So we were up at an ungodly time of the morning. He was dying a slow death and I was flipping channels because I couldn’t get back to sleep. I have to say, I got sucked into a number of infomericals that were absolutely horrendous. Is there anything Billy Mays doesn’t hawk?
One of my favorites is the Magic Bullet. It sounds suspiciously sexual, but it’s really like a mini blender. I actually got one for Christmas a few years ago and I loved it – until the motor burned out after a few months. The informercial is positively addicting though. I thought I was the only one who noticed the strange old lady wandering around with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth the whole commercial, but no: there’s a whole YouTube video dedicated to the lovely Hazel.
When I was in high school, the ever-present infomercial was the RonCo Electric Food Dehydrator. I always wanted one of those, but alas, I never got one. He just makes it seem so easy to make beef jerky, turkey jerky, dried fruit and MORE!
I’m cheating, though, because we didn’t actually see either of those commericials on T.V. at 5 a.m. last weekend. A couple we did see:
The Handy Switch. Just plug in the receiver in any outlet and then plug in the lamp to the receiver. You can stick its corresponding switch anywhere… even in your car so you can turn the lights on when you pull in the driveway! My favorite part is when Billy Mays says how great it is for kids to be able to turn the light off from bed – the infomercial cuts to a little girl in bed with a lamp within arm’s reach on a nightstand on one side of her bed and the switch within arm’s reach on the other side. She goes for the switch.
By the way, the number of products that Billy Mays endorses is insane. Here’s a sampling: OxyClean, OrangeGlo, Hercules Hooks, Mighty Putty, Easy Off Bam!, Kaboom! products, Bang! Automotive Dent Remover, Bump Be Gone zit cream, Gopher reaching tool, the Grip Wrench and the Ding King automotive Dent Remover (think the Bang! people were mad?).
Here’s Billy Mays falling into a bathtub.
Then there’s the Shamwow. It holds 20 times its weight in liquid!! The Web site says you’ll never have to use paper towels again – unless you’re prone to using them as napkins. But it’s not just for spills and car washing, oh no!! You can even use the Shamwow as a towel. Cut it in half and you’ll have two towels!! I’m glad they do the math for those of us who aren’t so hot at calculations. Shamwow isn’t promoted by Billy Mays, so it probably isn’t that great.
Feeling sick? It’s probably all of those toxins in your body – we all have them. What you need are Takara Detox Foot Patches. You just attach the pads to the bottom of your feet before going to bed and when you wake up in the morning, the pad will be black with all of the horrible toxins it has sucked out of your body. Asbestos? Mercury? No match for Takara Detox Foot Patches.
Yeah. It’s a good thing Paul didn’t get sick any earlier in the morning, because I would have totally been suckered into buying something if I had been exposed to these much longer. If the food dehydrator commercial had come on, I definitely would have been picking up my phone.
So, on the infomercial topic – what have you tried? What has actually worked and what has been a complete waste of money? Any food dehydrator users??
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