So in searching for an idea for this week’s entry (and admittedly running out of time for an idea for this week’s entry), I was bumming around YouTube and stumbled upon this:

I know that commercials have gotten more sophisticated since I was a kid; after all, Mars has made a fortune off of the licensing of the animated M&M’s that it currently features in its commercials.  But seeing this again for the first time in nearly 30 years, I have to say that is still one of the most perfect commercials because in thirty seconds it encapsulates playing baseball as a kid.

Okay, maybe not for me because I absolutely sucked when I was younger, but I do remember that this commercial came out right around the time I started my first year of “real” baseball (read: not tee ball), and there were times that while riding the bench (which I did a lot), I would talk to my teammates and we’d say that we were going to “take the ball dowwwntooowwwn.”  Plus, I think that every kid in the history of being kids has at some point sorted his or her M&M’s.

Yeah, I know that they all taste the same because they are milk chocolate that surrounded by a thin candy shell (hence it “melts in your mouth but not in your hand”), but the brown ones were so plain, and while the yellow and orange ones were slightly more interesting, the green ones stood out, so they were immediately a favorite.  And during a game, if we had M&M’s, we’d actually save the green ones before getting in the on-deck circle because I think that on some level we thought that the green M&M would lead to a home run.

Of course, that was never true and since then, M&M’s come in many more colors than the ones in the commercial and more flavors than just plain and peanut (the peanut butter ones are a personal favorite); however, I still like to think that there was something special about the green ones, even if there wasn’t truth in advertising.