Read My Lips

Giovedi 2 Marzo 22:25 - Madonna and Pepsi - The Big Bang

The Italian Madonna Pepsi Teaser Commercial. I always loved how there was a commercial for the commercial. The American version of this was first shown on February 22, 1989 during the Grammy Awards revealing the forthcoming March 2 debut of Madonna's Pepsi commercial that would feature the new song from her new album, Like a Prayer.

The actual commercial was shown just once on March 2, 1989 during America's number one television program, The Cosby Show. It was simultaneously shown in 40 countries around the world to 250 million viewers. The first time in media history that a commercial had an around the world satellite premiere.

The following day on MTV, Madonna premiered her fabulous video for the song, Like a Prayer. The shyt hit the fan. Pepsi withheld further airings of the commercial which were to be edited down 30 second spots of the original. Madonna was also supposed to shoot a second commercial that would announce her upcoming tour with the Pepsi logo all up and through. Never happened.

Christian groups went berserk. Christian fundamentalist, Reverend Donald Wildmon was so appalled with Madonna's video that he threatened to have his American Family Association 380,000 subscribers boycott Pepsi. Then Catholic Bishop, Rene Gracido also called Madonna's video offensive and threatened to not only going after Pepsi but it's other multi-million dollar fast food restaurants, as well. To top it all off, the Pope and the Vatican released a statement damning Madonna. Pepsi bowed out. We never got the second commercial and Madonna said, Eat It!!! - (not an actual quote) - and kept the 5 million bucks.

Click Here for a previous post that shows a great program explaining and illustrating not only the Pepsi controversy but also one of Madonna's Greatest Videos of All Time - Like a Prayer: Videos That Rocked The World.

Trivia: On March 3, 2010 - 21 years to the day Like a Prayer premiered on MTV, Rev. Donald Wildmon stepped down from the American Family Association.

Marvelous

Go In!

Videos That Rocked The World: The 'Citizen Kane' of music videos - Like a Prayer.

The year was 1989. For fans, Madonna had taken a very long hiatus. Very long being a year and half but back then it felt like an eternity! Anyone that lived through it knows what I'm talking about. Although she had filmed a new movie, Howard Brookner's Bloodhounds of Broadway and was extremely busy doing her first Broadway run of David Mamet's Speed the Plow, there was very little media output from Our Lady from late '87 to early '89. Basically, all we got were paparazzi pictures of her coming and going from Speed the Plow, an Entertainment Tonight coverage piece of the play, rumors of divorce from Sean Penn and the relationship with Sandra Bernhard. After her Who's That Girl world tour in 1987, she told Spin Magazine that she was burnt out on music and the music video medium.

Spin magazine article early 1988 - Madonna not feeling the music landscape and about to come in and funk things up.

There was a written piece on her in the now defunct Fame magazine in late 1988 written by novelist Harry Crews, and it was in there that she dropped the name of her new album, Like a Prayer. I remember thinking, Is she kidding? Like a Virgin, Like a Prayer? After hearing her discontentment with music and video, I was kind of like, On no, its going to be horrible. She's over music and over videos and the last taste in our mouth was the Who's That Girl video. Although that is one of my favorite Madonna looks, it is, in my opinion, one of her worst videos. But then about 6 months later the Like a Prayer song and video were released and my initial thoughts were immediately eradicated. Obviously. She came back with a vengeance and with one of the greatest songs ever written and recorded in the history of popular music and with a video that put all others to shame. The greatest and most controversial video ever made. The Citizen Kane of music videos. Never doubt the woman.

Here is the program Videos that Rocked the World from 2007 - which discusses in length not only the brilliant video but also the Pepsi commercial and all the influence and controversy it caused. With commentaries from the video's director - the brilliant Mary Lambert, producer Sharon Oreck, co-star Leon Robinson, the awful, back stabbing horrible and hypocritical Niki Harris, cinematographer Steve Poster and a slew of others.

So without further ado here is the program, Videos That Rocked the World, analyzing the greatest video ever made, Like a Prayer.



Fighting for the National Endowment of the Arts

Gaultier Sketches Continued...

Madonna Scrapbook reader Pheel mentioned in the La Isla post and elaborated further in the Stephen Bray post regarding La Isla being part of the Original Set List for Blond Ambition. It's funny, I don't know when but I came across the images that he took of the sketches done by Gaultier but I posted them Here in March of 2009.

I was always under the impression the sketches were done when it was going to be the "Like a Prayer Tour" sponsored by Pepsi as part of their deal before the video blew up in Pepsi's face! Ha! Then Madonna got the role of Breathless in Dick Tracy and everything shifted.

Here's what interesting things Pheel had to say and cleared things up:

"It was mentioned in french daily newspaper "Liberation" when "Blond Ambition Tour" hit Paris in July of 1990. Madonna was on the cover, a pic from the "Vogue" performance from the show. Inside there is an interview of Jean Paul Gaultier with original sketches of the costumes he made prior to the ones that were selected by Madonna. On these sketches she appears as a brunette with the same hairdo as in the "Like a prayer" video, she wears a bathrobe because he wanted her to take a shower on stage ( which she replaced by the masturbation scene. On the back of the bathrobe there was a tag "Taste Heaven". In this interview he talked about the "La Isla Bonita" costumes and how at the last minute he had to redo all the costumes because from when he took Madonna's measurments to the time she was about to start the tour she had lost a lot of weight and his team was forced to go to L.A to resize everything. A while ago i posted the sketches on a forum, it was a bad capture with my phone^^
I moved a lot since then so i have to look into my boxes to enearth them again."

The Making of the Like a Prayer Commerical

It's like a dream, no end and no beginning...

Oh, the blond lovelock...

Pepsi Commercial Mexico - Habla en Español!

Gorgeous. At Close Range premiere pic.