Ron Popeil created the Veg-o-Matic and inspired the Bass-O-Matic (but didn’t say “It slices! It dices!”)

When Ron Popeil titled his 1995 autobiographical book The Salesman of the Century it was not the kind of exaggeration used in the “As seen on TV” style of ads he pioneered.

Ron was born in New York City in 1935. He’s the son of inventor Samuel Popeil, creator of the Chop-o-Matic food chopper and its ultimately more famous offspring, the Veg-o-Matic food chopper and slicer.

Ron Popeil began his career in the 1950s, by selling those kitchen wonders and other gadgets invented by his father in live demonstrations at retail stores and county fairs.

By 1960 the Sam Popeil-coined name Veg-o-Matic was on its way to becoming a household word.

On November 15, 1960, the family received a trademark registration for it.

Ron helped take the Chop-o-Matic and Veg-o-Matic to the next level by appearing in early TV infomercials promoting them, using the same demonstration techniques and rapid-fire pitchman patter he had honed working for his father.

Contrary to what many people believe, he did not say “It slices! It dices!” in the Veg-o-Matic commercials. I always thought he did myself until I did some more research.

As Popeil adamantly stated in his biography and in interviews that book sparked, he never uttered the words “It slices! It dices!” in any ads.

"The only lines I used on TV about slicing and dicing,” he wrote in the book, “had to do with onions: ‘When slicing or dicing onions, the only tears you'll shed are tears of joy.’”

However, Popeil also noted that in some pitches and print ads the Veg-o-Matic was described as the product that “slices and dices and juliennes to perfection.”

And, at some point, the words “SLICES AND DICES” began being used on the Veg-o-Matic box. Moreover, many current online ads for the product, which is still being sold, say:

“The Ronco Veg-o-Matic is the one kitchen appliance you'll wonder how you ever did without! It slices, it dices, and so much more!”

So there is a connection between the Veg-o-Matic and the famous marketing phrase. It’s not just a figment of our imaginations.

In 1964, Ron created the Ronco company and went on to even greater fame and fortune.

During the following two decades, he invented or licensed a long list of Ronco products and perfected the “As seen on TV” approach to marketing them.

Some of the Ronco TV ads featured Ron himself, such as the one for GLH (short for “Good Looking Hair”), the much-mocked colored spray designed to cover bald spots on men’s (or women’s) heads.

Other Ronco commercials were announcer voiceover style demonstrations, showing the ingenious aspects of products like the Ronco Bottle and Jar Cutter, the Buttoneer, the Smokeless Ashtray, Mr. Microphone, the Salad Spinner, and the Pocket Fisherman.

Popeil, his products and his marketing approach inspired many imitators. Some Ronco products, like the Veg-o-Matic, were also licensed and further promoted in TV commercials by K-Tel, another pioneering “As seen on TV” company.

His Veg-o-Matic ads also inspired one of the greatest Saturday Night Live TV ad spoofs of all: the ”Bass-O-Matic” sketch performed by Dan Aykroyd on Episode 17 of Season 1.

In addition, Popeil led the way for later infomercial pitchmen like Billy Mays and Anthony “Sully” Sullivan.

He may not have been “the greatest” salesman of the 20th Century. But he certainly was one of them.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…

“Luke, I am your father!” — the most famous movie misquote ever?

On May 21, 1980, The Empire Strikes Back, the second film in the original Star Wars movie trilogy, had an initial release at a limited number of theaters in the US.

The nationwide release came nearly a month later on June 20, 1980.

Now called Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back since George Lucas decided to start producing Star Wars prequels, it’s still a favorite of many Star Wars fans — including me.

I can’t recall if I first saw The Empire Strikes Back at my local move theater in May or June of 1980.

But I know I went as soon as it was shown there, along with my daughter, who was already a Star Wars fan at age 6.

I vividly remember that, like other fans who saw it for the first time, my mind was blown by the shocking climactic scene in the huge air shaft of Cloud City on the planet Bespin, when Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill) fights a lightsaber duel with Darth Vader (played by David Prowse, with the voice overdubbed by James Earl Jones).

The first shocker in that scene (which you can watch in video clips online) is seeing Darth Vader cut off Luke’s right hand with his lightsaber.

Then Darth shocks viewers — and Luke — even more by saying he is Luke’s father.

Vader’s revelatory line is widely misquoted and often spoofed for comedic effect as: “Luke, I am your father!”

As serious Star Wars buffs know, Vader doesn’t say those exact words.

But somehow, the misquoted version took on a life of its own shortly after The Empire Strikes Back was released.

For example, a review in the June 28, 1980 edition of the Montana newspaper The Missoulian, says of the final fight scene between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader:

“Both are silent. After a few minutes, Luke’s hand is cut off and his lightsaber falls into a chasm surrounding him. Then all of a sudden Vader turns off his lightsaber and says ‘Luke, I am your father!’”

I’d guess that a review in a small Montana paper didn’t create the famous misquote.

I suspect it was floating around elsewhere in print and conversations in the weeks after the film was released.

At any rate, since 1980, “Luke, I am your father” has become one of the most familiar movie misquotations of all time.

Indeed, it’s often included in lists of top movie misquotes.

In case you can’t recall what Darth Vader really said, here’s a transcript of the exchange between him and Luke Skywalker with the actual “I am your father” quote.

DARTH VADER: “Don’t make me destroy you. Luke, you do not yet realize your importance. You have only begun to discover your power. Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.”
LUKE SKYWALKER: “I’ll never join you!”
DARTH: “If you only knew the power of the dark side. Obi-wan never told you what happened to your father.”
LUKE: “He told me enough! He told me you killed him.”
DARTH: “No. I am your father.”

This freaks out Luke as much as it did audiences.

He cries: “No! That’s not true. That’s impossible!”

Then he pushes himself off into the void of the Cloud City air shaft, seemingly falling to his death.

Of course, Luke lived on.

In the highly unlikely event that you haven’t seen the movie, I won’t explain how he survived.

What also survived long after The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980 is one of the most famous movie misquotes in the known universe.

Maybe the most famous.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading, viewing and stuff…

“Elvis has left the building.”

Even people who aren’t Elvis Presley fans know the line “Elvis has left the building.”
 
Credit for popularizing this famous quote goes to Al Dvorin, a Chicago bandleader and booking agent hired by Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker in 1957 to help organize Elvis concerts and serve as an announcer at the shows.

From the late 1950s until Presley’s death in 1977, Dvorin spoke these familiar words at the end of “The King’s” concerts, to let audiences know a show was definitely over and that Elvis would not be coming back for any more encores.

The most widely heard use of the line by Dvorin is on the live album Elvis as Recorded at Madison Square Garden, taped at a classic Presley concert at Madison Square Garden on June 10, 1972.

That album has been listened to by millions of people around the world. On the last track, titled “End Theme,” Al Dvorin is heard saying:

       “Elvis has left the building. Thank you and good night.”

Dvorin’s use of “Elvis has left the building” (sometimes preceded by “Ladies and Gentlemen…”) is so well known that many websites erroneously claim he coined the line.

In fact, although he did make it famous, he didn’t say it first.

It was actually coined as an off-the-cuff remark by Horace Lee Logan, the producer of Louisiana Hayride.

Louisiana Hayride was a pioneering country and early rockabilly music show broadcast on radio from 1948 to 1960 and on TV from 1955 to 1960 from Shreveport, Louisiana.

It helped launch the careers of many famous music artists, including Elvis Presley.

Elvis first appeared on the show in 1954, not long after his first single “That’s All Right, Mama” was released by Sun Records and before he was widely known.
Over the next two years, Presley had a string of hits and became a star.

When he returned for a final appearance on Louisiana Hayride on December 15, 1956, his young fans mobbed the auditorium in Shreveport where the show was held.

Elvis was the third of many performers scheduled to perform that day.

After he gave a final encore and exited the stage, many of the young people in the crowd continued screaming for him.

Some stood up and began leaving, either hoping to see Elvis outside or not seeming to understand that the Hayride show was not over.

At that point, according to various written sources, Hogan took the microphone and said: “Please, young people...Elvis has left the building. He has gotten in his car and driven away...Please take your seats.”

In an excerpt from an audio recording of the show, the words Hogan uses are slightly different (though it’s possible that the written sources and recording may both only include part of what he said that day).

What Hogan can be heard saying in the audio version is: “All right, uh, Elvis has left the building. I've told you absolutely straight up to this point, you know that, he has left the building. He left the stage and went out the back with the policemen and he is now gone from the building.”

Further confusing the issue is the fact that at least one version of the audio posted on YouTube credits these words to KWKH disc jockey Frank Page, who was the radio announcer for Louisiana Hayride.

Based on what I’ve read and other recordings of Page’s voice I’ve listened to, I believe the voice in the Louisiana Hayride audio is Horace Logan. (Some sites credit audio clips to Hogan that I think are actually the voice of Al Dvorin.)

What seems certain is that the phrase “Elvis has left the building” was first used at at the end of Presley’s appearance on Louisiana Hayride on December 15, 1956 and that it was later picked up and popularized by Al Dvorin — whose most famous use was recorded at the Elvis concert at Madison Square Garden on June 10, 1972.  

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…

“About one-fifth of the people are against everything all of the time.”

Some observers have expressed surprise that two populist, anti-establishment candidates who many people view as “extremists” won sizeable percentages of the votes in the 2016 presidential primary elections.

But in the past there have been other high profile populist presidential candidates who based their campaigns on disdain for “the establishment” and passionate opposition to something.

In 1964, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy uttered a oft-cited political quotation that is a reference to this phenomenon, though the connection is not widely known.

Speaking to a group of law students at the the University of Pennsylvania on May 6, 1964, Kennedy observed:

      “About one-fifth of the people are against everything all of the time.”

This quote (often given without the word “About”) is found in many books and on many websites, usually without any explanation of the context. 

Unfortunately, as far as I know, the speech is not posted anywhere online.

However, there is an old news story in the Google News Archive that sheds light on why Kennedy made the remark.

It’s a brief Associated Press article about the speech that ran in newspapers later that week.

The article notes that Kennedy was commenting on the fact that a sizeable percentage of U.S. voters had recently voted for Alabama Governor George Wallace in the 1964 Democratic Presidential primary elections.

Wallace was among the most prominent opponents of racial desegregation and efforts to secure equal rights for African Americans in the 1960s.

In his inaugural address as Governor on January 14, 1963, he famously committed himself to “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

On June 11, 1963, Wallace took his infamous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” at the University of Alabama. He literally stood in front of the door of the traditionally segregated school to try to block the entry of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood.

That and other highly publicized anti-integration antics and statements by Wallace made him the darling of pro-segregation whites in Southern and Northern states.

Buoyed by his notoriety, Wallace ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1964 against incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had succeeded John F. Kennedy after Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

Like JFK, President Johnson was supportive of the Civil Rights movement and committed to enforcing court-mandated desegregation of schools and other public facilities.

As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy was in the forefront of that battle. He was also helping Johnson push for enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in Congress, which had initially been proposed by his brother in 1963.

During the Democratic primary race, George Wallace waged a fiery populist campaign against Johnson, the Democratic and Washington establishment and desegregation.

Editorial writers, church leaders, trade unions, Democratic Party leaders and many other people and groups denounced him as an extremist, a right-wing racist and kook.

Nonetheless, thousands of cheering supporters showed up at his campaign events. And, he did surprisingly well in many primary elections—including those in some Northern states.

He won a third of the votes in Wisconsin, 43% in Maryland and nearly 30% in Indiana.

Robert F. Kennedy’s May 6th speech at the University of Pennsylvania came one day after the Indiana primary.

Kennedy decided to comment on it.

Here’s how the Associated Press story summarized what he said:

     PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy says he “was not surprised” at the strong vote for Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama in the Indiana presidential primary.
     Kennedy, speaking to 300 law students at the University of Pennsylvania Wednesday, said “there is a revolution now in the United States over civil rights and people don’t like to have their lives disturbed.”
     “It’s not surprising then,” he added, “that one-third of the people in Indiana voted for Wallace. About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.”
     Wallace, who campaigned against the civil rights bill pending in the Senate, got more than 29 per cent of the votes in losing to Democratic Gov. Matthew E. Welsh.

Of course, Johnson went on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidential election of 1964.

On that same election night in 1964, Robert F. Kennedy was elected U.S. Senator for New York.

Four years later, his own run at the presidency was cut short when he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.

Would Kennedy have won the 1968 presidential election if he’d lived? Possibly.

Republican Richard Nixon won with less than a 1% margin in the popular vote over Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey, who was less well known and less popular than Kennedy.

George Wallace ran for president again in 1968 as a third party candidate.

His policy positions appealed to independent, anti-establishment voters. The majority were angry white men.

They felt the federal government and courts were trying to force things down their throats that they totally disagreed with and the politicians were wasting their tax dollars on welfare and foreign aid. And, they agreed with Wallace’s claim that “there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two major parties.”

Wallace pledged to address many of the key things they were against. He pledged to end federal efforts at desegregation, reduce spending on welfare programs, slash foreign aid, stop the “tyranny” of the U.S. Supreme Court and block gun control proposals.

In the November 1968 election he received 13.5% of the popular vote.

As in 1964, most of the people who voted for Wallace in 1968 clearly fit the demographics of the “antis” Robert Kennedy had in mind when he made his famous observation.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page

Related reading…

The origins of the “The Domino Effect”…

Contrary to what many sites on the Internet say, President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not coin the famous Cold War term “the Domino Effect.” 

He did use the phrase “falling domino principle” in a famous press conference on April 7, 1954.

Journalists at the time dubbed this “The Domino Theory,” which later came to be referred to as “the Domino Effect.”

The political concept encapsulated by those terms — the idea that if one country fell to the control of Communists, then nearby countries could follow — was a major foundation of America’s foreign policy during the Cold War years, which lasted from 1947 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

This concern was initially raised by President Truman’s Undersecretary of State, Dean Acheson.

In 1947, the government of Greece faced threats from Communist insurgents and Turkey seemed to be falling under the sway of the Soviet Union. Acheson warned in various public statements that, if the “Reds” took over in Greece and Turkey, Communism would likely spread south to Iran and as far east as India.

To counter this threat, President Truman asked Congress to approve $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey and proposed an anti-Communist policy eventually referred to as “The Truman Doctrine.” 

“It must be the policy of the United States,” Truman explained in a high-profile speech to Congress, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

President Eisenhower, Truman’s successor, agreed with the Truman Doctrine’s goal of containing the spread of Communism. And, early  in his first term in office, he was forced to consider the need to apply that doctrine to Southeast Asia.

By 1954, France was on the verge of losing control of its colony Indochina (later called Vietnam) to Communist insurgents led by Ho Chi Minh. Eisenhower and his administration worried that if Indochina fell to Communist control, other Southeast Asian countries would follow.

During a White House press conference on April 7, 1954, reporter Robert Richards of the Copley Press asked Eisenhower: “Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina for the free world? I think there has been, across the country, some lack of understanding on just what it means to us.”

Eisenhower famously responded:

“You have, of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things. First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs.

Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.

Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call ‘the falling domino principle.’ You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”

Eisenhower said this disintegration would lead to the “loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following.”

In many news stories, reporters referred to Eisenhower’s falling domino principle as “the Domino Theory” or as “the Domino Effect.” The latter was a term that journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop used in their popular syndicated newspaper column and claimed to have coined.

A month after Eisenhower made his famous remarks in 1954, Vietminh forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap defeated French troops at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

France soon ceded control of its former colony. And, under an agreement hammered out in Geneva, Indochina was partitioned into Communist-controlled North Vietnam and non-Communist South Vietnam.

In the following years, Eisenhower provided economic assistance and weapons to the fledgling South Vietnamese government and sent in a small number of American military advisors.

During the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy significantly expanded U.S. economic and military assistance to South Vietnam and increased the number of military advisors there to more than 16,000.

These decisions by Eisenhower and Kennedy set in motion a political and military domino effect that ultimately led to the Vietnam War.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…