Remembering Ed McMahon's (And America's) Younger Days

In the immediate aftermath of anyone's death, it's customary to remember the best of them, and understandably so. In the case of Ed McMahon that's certainly his nearly 30 years with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. (And maybe "Star Search" was the precursor to "American Idol.") But those were actually his later years.

Embedded below is a very old 1 minute Budweiser commercial starring a much younger Ed McMahon. It's from "a more civilized age" in America when tv ads would last a full minute, when a Budweiser brewery was apparently the "largest tourist attraction in Florida" and when a large corporation would crowd wild animals from "darkest Africa" into a theme park in an unfamiliar climate and pay a celebrity to brag about it on tv while holding a beer....

(Though you may notice that at the very end of this commerical, Ed keeps looking down hesitantly at the beer in his hand, as if it were a urine sample rather than a Budweiser.)