Aardman Animations (found Cuprinol stop-motion TV ads from British animation studio; 1988-late 1990s)

A screenshot from one of the Cuprinol Man ads.

Status: Found

Date found: 07 Aug 2015

Found by: Cuprinol

Aardman Studios is a British stop-motion claymation animation studio.^[1] The studio gained most of its acclaim for the 2000 feature film Chicken Run and for creating the Wallace and Gromit series, but it's also responsible for films including Owzat and Flushed Away.

Before creating feature films, Aardman Studios created adverts for Cuprinol, a famous wood care product. In these ads, the wood-crafted "Cuprinol Man" (voiced by Robbie Coltrane, who would later enjoy fame as Hagrid in the Harry Potter film series) would talk to the audience, to showcase how good the Cuprinol wood preserver is and especially in comparison to other brands, regularly showing off how well it works on himself. The ads were always bookended with the slogan "Cuprinol - No one does wood more good".

The first ad in question has the Cuprinol Man out in the rain, with an umbrella, near a pond with a duck residing who shares his wooden aesthetic. This ad presumably showcased how well Cuprinol works against rain and other water, something that is also shown in the other ads. The second ad shows him talking about how long the wood preserver lasts, as the camera goes to a different angle to reveal that he is sitting next to a giant hourglass that indicates how it practically lasts "forever". Not much is available on the third ad other than that it ends with him abruptly landing in a chair with drumsticks in his hands, which he then uses to tap a rhythm onto the Cuprinol product. The fourth ad was called "Piggles", which aired in 1977 and ran for 10 seconds. It was thought to be either the same ad, as the one where he compares doors with and without Cuprinol, or the preceding missing ad.

The only footage that could originally be found from the first two ads were short semi-audioless clips from A History of Aardman used with permission from the Cuprinol company, and the only footage of the third was the cut-off ending of it, so these resided as some of the few elusive Aardman commercial productions out there besides the Sumitomo "Wallace and Gromit" advert.

On August 20th, 2015, Cuprinol decided to upload their older adverts with the Cuprinol Man, and on September 17th, 2015, they uploaded the three formerly definitively lost adverts listed in this article as unlisted videos within a playlist linked at the end of their Facebook Cuprinol Man videos.^[2]