BOOTLEG FILES 777: “The Nancy Walker / Bounty Paper Towel Commercials” (1970-1990 television commercial campaign).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: No perceived value in compiling 20 years’ worth of commercials.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
If you were watching U.S. television in the 1970s, it was impossible not to find Nancy Walker somewhere on the dial. She was simultaneously appearing on two popular shows at the same time – “McMillan & Wife” and “Rhoda” – and turned up in guest starring appearances on various series and variety shows; she also had notoriety for starring in two of the fastest flops of the decade, “The Nancy Walker Show” and “Blansky’s Beauties.”
But Walker’s highest level of ubiquity came via a series of television commercials for the Bounty brand of paper towels. In these 30- and 60-second offerings, Walker took on the persona of Rosie, the owner of a New Jersey diner who clientele consisted of the most physically uncoordinated people on the planet. While sitting at the diner lunch counter, cups of coffee were inevitably spilled, but Walker’s Rosie was there for the rescue with a sheet of Bounty paper towel.
(Just as an aside – many sources identify Rosie merely as a waitress. Actually, the earliest commercials featured a menu for “Rosie’s Diner” – so unless there was a second Rosie who was the off-camera owner of the establishment, Rosie was more than waitress.)
In concept, Rosie should have worn out her welcome – not to mention her paper towel roll – fairly quickly. After all, how many times can you watch someone wipe up a coffee spill? Yet the Rosie campaign ran for 20 years and hundreds of commercials. What was the secret to this campaign’s success?
Rosie was among the earliest working women at the center of television commercials. From the dawn of U.S. television through the early 1960s, women in commercials were usually housewives who were focused on housekeeping, child raising and acquiring frilly indulgences. That slowly changed in the 1960s as Jane Withers’ Josephine the Plumber (for Comet scouring powder) and Jan Miner’s Madge the Manicurist (for Palmolive dish detergent) began turning up frequently on the small screen. These women were jolly, a bit facetious when initially dealing with clueless customers but ultimately warm and wise in pointing out the solutions to minor domestic challenges.
Withers was a popular child star who never had the same level of celebrity as an adult, although she was an active working actress, while Miner never had instant name recognition despite a lengthy acting career. Thus, they could easily slip into their characters without raising recollections of different personas in other works.
Walker had a long career in Broadway, movies, recording and television, but was almost always in the comedy relief supporting parts. When she started as Rosie, she was a familiar face but not a distracting presence. She also exuded a maternal wisdom – after all, she was the one serving the food and coffee to her diner patrons, so naturally she would be the one to offer sage advice on cleaning up spills. (She later claimed this role secure her the part of Rhoda’s mother in a guest appearance on “The Mary Tyle Moore Show.”)
The commercials initially defined Bounty as the “quick picker upper,” but that was changed to the more alliterative “quicker picker upper.” Walker’s Rosie would demonstrate the absorption power of Bounty in one of two ways: a comparison against an inferior brand in wiping up liquid spills or running the center of the towel under water, holding it outstretched in a horizontal manner and then balancing a full cup of coffee on the watery towel center. In both tests, Bounty saved the day.
Viewers never got bored with Rosie’s endless promotion of Bounty and the infinite variations of coffee spills that required her input. In the 1980s Walker began to spend more time behind the camera, first as the unlikely choice to direct the 1980 Village People musical “Can’t Stop the Music” and then with theater and television directing jobs. She made fewer appearances on television through the decade as health problems slowed her down. Walker was a lifelong smoker and suffered from lung cancer in her later years – this forced her to finally step away from the Rosie role in 1990. She passed away two years later at the age of 69.
The Bounty brand would later attempt to revive the campaign with a younger actress as Rosie, but it didn’t work and the brand wisely opted not to pursue that at great length. A number of the vintage Walker commercials can be found on YouTube, including a bizarre match between her Rosie and football legend Rosey Grier, which was among the very few times that a celebrity showed up in her diner.
Since a DVD or Blu-ray compilation of the 20 years of Rosie commercials is unlikely, the best way for fans of old-time television to get their fill of toweled-up coffee spills is via the YouTube posts. And with that, let us raise a coffee cup in honor of Walker’s wonderful creation – but, please, just don’t spill the contents or back to where we started!
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