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K-Tel

Posts Tagged ‘K-Tel’

The K-tel Bigfoot commercial

K-tel big foot

K-TEL didn’t just make K-Tel Record Selector, non-stick frying pans and fight with Ronco for your hard-earned pennies. It made the  “Bigfoot”, as seen in this Bigfoot commercial. How many children were shot by Big Game hunters hoping they’d caught the Sasquatch can only be guessed at. But let’s not rush to judgement. It was a different era back then, when children went outdoors and big feet meant big fun…

Posted: 25th, June 2013 | In: Flashback, The Consumer | Comment


The Ghost of Christmas Presents Past: Mr Microphone

THE Ghost of Christmas Presents Past – Number Three: Mr Microphone

LAST month we looked at the K-Tel “Various Artists” compilation albums that took Britain by storm in the Seventies. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

K-Tel was the brainchild of Philip Kives, a salesman from Winnipeg. In the mid-sixties he was flogging new-fangled Teflon pans by demonstrating them on TV. It worked a treat, so he went to Australia, where he used the same method to shift a million knives in five months, making a profit of a million dollars.

This didn’t go down too well with his supplier, Seymour Popeil, who refused to do business with him after that. Kives responded by temporarily shifting his attention to records, releasing 25 Great Country Artists Singing Their Original Hits in Canada. Then he set up K-Tel, which sold both gadgets and records, and pushed both with maximum energy and minimum subtlety.

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Posted: 24th, December 2009 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Photojournalism | Comments (5)