Dominick's Finer Foods with Elaine Mulqueen (Commercial #1, 1973)

The transfer of this clip made possible by your generous donations!

Here's a commercial for Dominick's Finer Foods, with Elaine Mulqueen appearing in glorious color after years of being seen in black-and-white on Mulqueen's Kiddie A-Go-Go. Here, she spotlights the 50 stores located throughout Chicagoland (25 of which are now open Monday - Saturday until midnight and Sunday from 9am to 9pm), with various photo slides inside the numerous sections of each of the Dominick's supermarkets.

This spot was preceded by a brief shot of a slate typeset on a primitive CG system, indicating that the agency was Mulqueen Production, the director was D. Howard, and the production company Ja-Tel Productions. The slate is accompanied by a tone around 1400 Hz.

These came from an old Quad spot reel tape I found recently in the basement of Jack Mulqueen's house. He had forgotten it was there and allowed me get it transferred. First it had to be professionally cleaned and restored though. Photos of the tape can be seen here. As you can see in the pictures, this tape was marked "WGN Continuity File Number: VTR-424" and also seems to indicate that the spots were originally intended for airing during the Columbus Day Parade broadcast. Were they ever used on air? Based on what was written in pencil on the bottom of the box - "No Color Bars - Not acceptable for Spot schedule", perhaps not.

Again, according to the tape, this and the other Dominick's spots featuring Ms. Mulqueen were recorded on October 4th 1973.

This (possibly) aired on local Chicago TV around October of 1973.

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