10 Retro Reese's Commercials You Probably Forgot About

As anyone who grew up in the 1970s, '80s, or '90s can attest, old-school candy commercials totally worked on us. Ads with catchy jingles and clever gimmicks that ran ad nauseum on television until we knew them by heart left us craving whatever sweet treat was being advertised. And the ads for the various Reese's candies had some of the most memorable commercials from those generations, bar none.

Commercials that depicted various fabricated origin stories of the first combining of peanut butter and chocolate were among the most common of early Reese's ads. Another classic campaign purported to show how various Reese's superfans liked to eat their Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Don't be surprised if you find yourself being able to recite these ads word for word, or that you still know the jingles by heart — even if you haven't seen or even thought about these commercials in 30 years, or more. On the other hand, we might surprise you with some ads you haven't seen before, either because you were too young when they aired, or they just didn't find themselves in rotation when and where you did most of your TV watching at the time. These commercials round out our collection of classic Reese's television spots, covering a variety of eras, products, and campaigns.

As mentioned, a popular ongoing theme for Reese's commercials — especially Reese's Peanut Butter Cups — was to portray people accidentally stumbling into "discovering" how good chocolate and peanut butter taste together. And this late 1970s, early '80s classic is one of the most iconic examples.

Two people are walking down the street, listening to music on their headphones, and each enjoying a snack, oblivious to the world around them. One of them is eating a chocolate bar, while the other is ... just eating peanut butter straight out of a jar with her fingers. Yeah, that part if a bit of a stretch. But anyway, they round the same corner and bump into each other, initially complaining that their snacks have gotten mixed up, until they realize with great delight that the chocolate bar tastes delicious dipped in the peanut butter. A man then appears between them to show them a package of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, a product that they were clearly unaware existed — up to that point.

There have actually been studies done to determine why everyone loves peanut butter and chocolate. The study doesn't say that it's because of commercials like this, but we know better, don't we?

In the late '80s, Reese's launched an ad campaign that will immediately be familiar to Gen Xers and older Millennials. Accompanied by the tagline, "there's no wrong way to eat a Reese's," it was a series of TV spots that were framed as Reese's Peanut Butter Cup fans telling the camera how they preferred to partake in the candy. Most were actors portraying "regular people," though a celebrity of the era got in on the action as well.

Perhaps the most well-known ad from this line was the one featuring a teenager and his little brother. The teenager explains that his brother loves Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, but that he consumes them in an unusual way. We then see the little brother hold up a Reese's Cup with a hole in the middle, to the befuddlement of his brother. Of course, as any Reese's Cup connoisseur knows, the candy's soft center and signature texture make it easy to simply poke a hole through the center, just with your finger.

Other spots from the campaign include: a kid saying he likes his Reese's Cup with milk, as he's walking a cow; an elderly man who slowly nibbles around the Cup, while gradually working toward the center; and real-life NASCAR driver Bill Elliot having his candy delivered to him by a pit crew who also shines his shoes, straightens the collar on his shirt, and wipes his mouth, before rushing off. 

One of the most popular varieties of Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, and a sweet treat that should be in every Easter basket, is the iconic Reese's Peanut Butter Egg. It seems to be a requirement that an Easter-specific candy have at least one ad campaign that centers around the Easter Bunny making or enjoying said treat, and Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs are no exception, thanks to this '80s spot.

The commercial opens on an empty cottage, which is soon revealed to be the home of the Easter Bunny. Though he's never seen in full, we are given glimpses of his hands, feet, and ears as he seems to be settling in from a long day of filling Easter baskets with Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs — as confirmed by a radio that is playing a news report about that exact occurrence. The Easter Bunny then sits down, soaks his feet, and prepares to partake in a plate full of Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs and a glass of milk.

But what's a commercial without a punchline of some kind? As the spot is ending, the radio gets fuzzy, at which point the Easter Bunny adjust his ears and makes the radio signal clear again. This gives the announcer the excuse to point out that Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs have been "getting quite the reception." 

In one of the later entries into Reese's "two great tastes that taste great together" series of ads, this one sets the origin of combining chocolate and peanut butter as happening in 2104 B.C. Two men are discussing how good the two foods taste together, with one of them saying they should tell Noah about the combo, since he's known to be a fan of both chocolate and peanut butter. The other guy asks, "You mean the guy building the ark?" — both making sure the audience knows who Noah is, and to set up the joke that will serve as the crux of the whole spot.

As they get up to go tell Noah about their culinary concoction, they see that it's storming outside, and decide to wait until later to bring their discovery to Noah. We then see the necks of two giraffes pass by the window of the room, confirming that the storm is the biblical storm that lasted for 40 days and wiped out all living things that weren't on Noah's ark.

In what is actually a pretty dark punchline when you really think about it, these two men are therefore doomed, and will have perished not long after they had this conversation. Which means that the world will have to wait for someone else to discover the combining of chocolate and peanut butter that will subsequently lead to the invention of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

We tried not to double dip on any one specific era of Reese's ads, but we couldn't resist sharing a second one from the "the world would have to wait" series of ads that the Noah's ark spot was also part of. This one also opens with text indicating a year — in this case, 1797. After Noah's pals perished before they could tell the world about combining chocolate and peanut butter, Dr. Frankenstein also stumbled upon that discovery many centuries later. Well, kind of.

In fact, it was Dr. Frankenstein's monster who, mere moments after being brought to life, grabbed a nearby chocolate bar and dipped it into a jar of peanut butter. The creature delighted at this discovery, and was keen to share it with whomever would listen. Which, of course, was nobody, as everyone was too busy running away from the creature to let it present them with snacking recommendations.

Now we see why the creature became so unhinged. Can you imagine being the first one to try dipping chocolate and peanut butter, but nobody will listen when you try to tell them how amazing it tastes?

Going into the '90s, candy companies really upped their game in terms of commercial jingles. From the iconic pop art Whatchamacallit commercial to stretching it out with Caramello, almost every type of candy had a theme song worthy of radio play. And entering that conversation was the "you'll love 'em to pieces" ad for Reese's Pieces that will have kids of a certain generation already hearing the song in their heads, before they even click the video.

The incredibly catchy tune lists a bunch of things that also come in "pieces" — timepieces, mouthpieces, masterpieces, etc. — while always coming back to Reese's Pieces. All throughout, a second voice is constantly whispering "Reese's Pieces," adding a fun little subliminal element to the whole thing, and probably a big part of why so many of us remember the ad so well.

Reese's Pieces are often overshadowed by Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and deserve more love, and this spot surely went a long way in making them feel hip and relevant in a way that hadn't happened since the movie "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" had done for them, a decade earlier. 

Video games were still a trendy new thing in the '80s, and a lot of companies capitalized on that fact with ads that incorporated gaming in some way. For Reese's, that meant having two kids play an approximation of Pac-Man that had them trying to collide their avatars — one representing chocolate, the other representing peanut butter — in the middle of the maze where the words "Collision Alert" appear.

Or were they trying to avoid one another? Honestly, it's hard to tell. Perhaps because the mainstream world was still trying to figure out what video games even were exactly, the objective of this fictional game isn't entirely clear. At some points, the players seem to be encouraging one another to collide. Other times, they seem to be doing the opposite, including what sounds like expressions of disappointment when their avatars explode upon running into one another.

Either way, it's a fun Reese's ad that makes for a neat time capsule from an era when everyone was trying to attach themselves to Pac-Man fever, even when they didn't really understand what that actually meant.

We gave Reese Sticks the top spot in our ranking of Reese's candy varieties, and praised how well the snack holds together — despite it being built with crispy, crunchy wafers. And that is what the company hung its hat on when first advertising the product after its launch in 1998. "The snack that won't hold you back" was the tagline, selling Reese Sticks as a candy bar of convenience that you can easily munch on without making a mess, no matter what you are doing.

This was peak extreme sports era, so Reese's had athletes in mind when promoting Reese Sticks. In this cool ad, a stick figure is skiing on a pair of Reese Sticks, performing a number of tricks with ease. The implication is that you'll be able to do something as active as skiing, and still be able to have a Reese Stick in hand for all your sugar-based energy needs. The whole ad had a similar vibe to the very successful "Red Bull gives you wings" campaign of the same era.

It's especially relevant right now, as we see more and more generic, soulless, samey-looking AI ads, to pine for the days of commercials like this, that specifically went for that scrappy, handmade aesthetic. 

We had to include one last "two great tastes that go great together"/"you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" ad on this list for a few reasons — chief among them, that this late '70s cowboy version of the ad has a really fun country music jingle to go along with the gimmick. The slapsticky nature of the spot, wherein one of the cowboys comedically falls off his horse two different times, also stands out from the pack. And lastly, the end of the ad shows not only the traditional Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, but also Reese's Crunchy, which was released around that time. In fact, both actual cups shown in the ad were the Crunchy ones, which means those are meant to be the focal point of the ad.

Nowadays, there seems to be a new variety of Reese's Cup every other week. But Reese's Crunchy was the first-ever variation on the classic formula. Over the years, crunchy versions of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup have come and gone, sometimes with slight variations on the name, but always built around the same concept. The crunchy version of Reese's Cups have clearly never been popular enough to become a permanent option, but also still have enough fans that the company is willing to try bringing it back every so often.

There are a number of bizarre vintage food ads we can't believe are real, and this Reese's Pieces commercial from the mid-1980s definitely falls under that umbrella. In fact, one could argue that it pushes into the realm of nightmare fuel, which is why we saved it for last. Apologies if you got a jump scare when you first scrolled down and saw the massive-headed alien in the preview image for this commercial.

Clearly trying to carry over the idea that beings from other planets love Reese's Pieces first introduced in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," this ad sees that iconic being swapped out for a bizarre-looking alien with a large head, oversized eyes, and pointy ears that extend well beyond the top of its head. This alien shows up at the home of an Earth family, seemingly unannounced, to share some Reese's Pieces with a human child. When the kid calls on his mom to see the "little blue guy" at the door, the alien has left, and a short man in a blue outfit is there instead — who the boy acknowledges as "Cousin Willy." 

It's a pretty generic premise that was nothing special on its own, but the strange and borderline-creepy being is what makes this spot worth reminiscing about. Or, perhaps you were already traumatized by it as a kid and had successfully blocked it out until now — in which case, we apologize once again.