September 21, 2009: "Bass-o-Matic"

Author:
C. Sloan

Concept:
Well, the serious, numismatic purpose of this ad was to highlight the fact that this fabulous coin once resided in the grand collection of Harry Bass.

How to do that in an interesting and provocative way led us, questionably, to quote a tasteless 1970’s Saturday Night Live skit in which Dan Aykroyd inexplicably puts a bass (the fish kind) into a blender dubbed the "Bass-o-Matic".

Sure, it was a juvenile and frankly disgusting comedy sketch, but it is surely the most memorable ‘bass’ reference we or our guest author could think of. And we figured that if we remembered it for 30 years+, some of our customers might too.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
Well, there was one other memorable line in the same old SNL sketch, which Aykroyd utters after he takes a sip of the blended fish:

"Mmmmm, that’s good Bass!".

But that seemed even more obscure and even less appealing to think about, so we went with the less explicit, more-likely-to-be-understood version to your left.