Scrubbing history.

If you're old enough you might just know who these guys are. And if you do, and your brain works like mine (and you're not under medication yet), you might know what they have to do with Sprint and Verizon.

First, the easy stuff. This is an animation cel on sale at Etsy from an ad for S.O.S soap pads. For a while in the 1970s, S.O.S ran a series of commercials wherein its blue hero "Big Blue" combated "Pink Pad" (a not-even-barely-disguised Brillo pad) over whose soap held out longest. Pink Pad usually lost his pink soap after a single shot from a water pistol or the like. Blue Pad had no such difficulty. He had endurance. I wish I could post one of the old ads, but despite my belief that YouTube has everything, it doesn't have any of them.

S.O.S pads and Brillo pads, interestingly, emerged the same year in American history, 1917, as a pad made specially for use in scrubbing hard-to-clean pots and pans. (The last period in S.O.S was left off intentionally, Wikipedia tells us, so that the name could be trademarked.) In time a fierce battle arose over which steel wool pad would become the king of America's kitchen sinks. In 1967 (according to Betty Bock's 1968 edition of Mergers and Markets) the two brands accounted for 98.6% of the steel wool pad market. Families generally were loyal to one or the other, as they were to Coke or Pepsi, Tide or All, Hertz or Avis, Crest or Colgate. We were a Brillo family.

The S.O.S animated commercials were fun, and certainly caught the eye of any kids watching daytime TV (we were starved for cartoons). I have read that no less than Oscar winner Broderick Crawford himself did the voice of the pink pad. As he later said of all TV work: "To pay the rent and keep your face up there, you do TV. Hell, if they're stupid enough to pay you for that junk, that's their problem.''

I hated that my family's soap pad was being humiliated by that blue goon, though.

In time the ad campaign ended, and here's where things got odd. As part of his campaign to do anything for a buck, Broderick Crawford then made a TV ad for Brillo. He was seen in person scouring pots with Brillo, and heard saying, "Hi, I'm Brillo, the pink pad. You remember me from that -- blue pad commercial... Well, you haven't seen that commercial around much lately. That's because, due to a new Brillo formula, my soap now outlasts that blue pad's. And I couldn't say that on TV if it weren't true. So if that blue pad claims longer lasting soap than Brillo, don't you believe it!" (Thanks to American Radio History's archive of Broadcasting newsweekly for filling in all the blanks in my and my family's memory.)

Which brings me to Paul Marcarelli, the actor who for years played the Test Man for Verizon commercials and now plays, I don't know, Revenge Guy for Sprint commercials. It's a curious thing when commercial actors are turned loose and go after the competition. I wonder if Lily (Milana Vayntrub) from AT&T will wind up doing ads for Boost Mobile, or if Flo (Stephanie Courtney) will ever be tossed from Progressive and wind up making ads with that gekko. Could happen.

As for Brillo and S.O.S, despite being the biggest soap pads on the block, things have been challenging for those veritable brands since the 1970s. Miles Brands sold S.O.S to Clorox, and Brillo's parent company was bought by Dial, who sold it to Church & Dwight, who sold it to Armaly Brands. Store brands and other competitors have taken Big Blue and Pink Pad down a few pegs.

Will Sprint and Verizon wind up the same way? And what does this have to do with anything?

Beats me. I just love this stuff.