Have you ever been on holiday somewhere, flipped on the TV, and just stared back at the out of context weirdness of it all? It gives you a culture shock to see advertisements in another language you don’t know, and luckily for you I’m here to recreate that feeling with these recently found Italian Sega commercials! This comes as site whoeatallthepies.tv posted a collection of the advertisements, each featuring Italian football star, Roberto Mancini. The ad’s themselves were pointed out by twitter user ‘SavileRogue;.
It’s a weird feeling, seeing these ad’s as they’re really not that different from British or American Sega commercials. These videos definitely have an ‘attitude’ about them which I can remember being an elemets in nearly all of Sega’s old advertising. Want to see the rest of the ad’s and decide if that’s true or not? Just hit the jump, friend!
Nice! I wonder what the eye thing means? Even animated Sonic did it
Man, so many memories… 🙂
I’m italian, I remember those ads very well. I wanna thank you to let me jump back in my childhood by giving you some news about Sega in Italy.
The “eye thing” was a typical joke of Jerry Calà, a really popular italian comic actor back in 80’s and first half of 90’s. He said “Ocio però: sono Giochi Preziosi!”, that roughly means “Keep an eye on: exclusively by Giochi Preziosi!”.
“Ocio” is a slang Veneto word (the region of Venice), it means “occhio”, eye.
“Giochi Preziosi” is a huge toy-related company, it’s the second one in Europe behind LEGO and the fifth one in the world behind Mattel, Hasbro and Bandai (it created Gormiti, I think they’re known in USA…)
In 1992, Sega choose an important adv agency (PROGRESS CONSULTANT s.r.l. Milano) to launch a strange promotion. If you buyed one Mega Drive or one Master System II Plus or three games in a row, you got the “Sonic Badge”. It was an electronic Sonic-like badge, you was suppose to switch on and wear it in front of the TV. When Sega ads appeared, if your badge ringed you won a price (it varied from Mega CD to a game of your choice) and you had to call the phone number showed on TV.
I never had one, but i read that the winning badges ringed according to a precise audio frequency emanated by the TV.
Here’s the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViOn4dmuKn0
And here’s an interesting review in english: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGVSOoxXr1s
Last thing: the correct italian pronounciation for “sega” it’s… “sega”, straight, just like the english one (and japanese too, i guess). Now, in italian “sega” means “jigsaw”, but it also means “hand-job”! That’s why they decided to create a fake english pronounciation: “seega” 🙂
That’s awesome! Thanks for the response!