Sears Air Conditioning Commercial

Submission 17,519

About

Sears Air Conditioning Commercial refers to an advertisement which ran for several years in the 1990s and 2000s on television featuring a couple talking about buying an air conditioner before cutting to a man reading information about an air conditioning unit available at the chain store Sears. The commercial's long run on television has made it a key piece of 90s Nostalgia and is frequently referenced and parodied online.

Origin

The exact dates the commercial ran are unclear. Several online accounts remembering the commercial specify it ran often during the 90s and early 2000s.^[1]^[2]^[3] The earliest dated upload of the commercial is a December 29th, 2008 YouTube upload by user EdsteveTheGreat which gained over 900,000 views (shown below).

Spread

After the video was posted online, it was reposted in several forums such as Straight Dope^[1] and Retro Junk^[4] celebrating it as an artifact of the 1990s. Additionally, the commercial was remembered in blog posts on sites including Post Grad Problems^[2] and Luminus Agency,^[5] who included it in a list of "So bad they're good" commercials. Many Reddit threads have been devoted to the commercial as well.^[6]

The commercial has been parodied and recreated online in several videos. In 2015, Some Ecards^[7] posted a video of sketch comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade parodying the commercial in a sketch (shown below). On January 20th, 2015, YouTuber john smith uploaded a parody wherein the wife in the commercial held her husband at gunpoint, gaining over 559,000 views (shown below, right).