This commercial for Shasta Orange Soda ran incessantly on TV around 1977. A lot of folks who saw it thought, "Hey! That's Barry Williams from The Brady Bunch!" But I couldn't watch it without thinking about the crummy rhyme. They got the rights to an old song — or maybe it was public domain, I don't know — that went…
I'm looking over / A four leaf clover
…and they changed it to…
You're looking over / An orange soda
…which doesn't rhyme. "Over" and "soda" do not rhyme. They never have. They never will. You can't even mispronounce one of them, Bert Lahr style, and make them sort of rhyme. You could, however, change it like this…
Come get a load a' / An orange soda
Even better, they could have done…
My soda has ta / Be Orange Shasta
When I first heard this commercial, I thought of that in maybe five seconds. Half the people reading this could have done that in approximately the same time and Sondheim could have done it in two. Why did no one involved with this commercial think of that? Or if someone did, why didn't they use it? I don't drink soda anymore but when I did, I always insisted that the jingles rhyme.