Kiss Frontman Paul Stanley’s Long-Lost Folgers Commercial is Truly Bizarre

Breaking on the internet today is a long-lost Folger’s commercial featuring Kiss frontmant Paul Stanley (a.k.a Starchild). YouTube user imakissfan unearthed the commercial yesterday, saying it was never aired by parent company Proctor & Gamble. Now-deleted comments from the uploader said P&G withheld the commercial after focus groups asked “who’s the old, creepy guy?”

In the commercial, makeup-free Stanley is inexplicably walking around a circus tent below two high-flying acrobats while tenderly holding a steaming mug of coffee in two hands. The song progresses through an odd accordion-and-drums buildup with the lyrics, “This is your wake up call / Time to reach and go for it all / Folgers stirs inside of me and I know what I can be / Limit is the sky / Hey world, watch me fly.”

Finally, distorted electric guitars kick in for the song’s climactic finish, “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.” After belting the final line, Stanley adopts a twisting posture reminiscent of a Siegfried & Roy move before dissolving into thin air.

According to the Kiss fan page Kissanity, Stanley discussed the commercial in a 2000 interview, taking Kiss’s well-known “Why not?” approach to brand leverage. “Life is strange,” says Stanley. “I got a call asking if I was interested in singing a Folger’s commercial. And like many other things, I thought ‘Why not?’ I wasn’t at all concerned with who thinks it is okay or not okay, cool, not cool, rock ‘n roll or not. I had a blast doing it and like I said, isn’t that what this is all about?”