When Thunderbolt put the yeeee-hawwww in Houston

Print

“If your transmission’s got you down or your motor falls apart. It’s the time to come to Thunderbolt. You don’t need a brand new car! We still believe in value, and we pass it on to you. At Thunderbolt we fix it right and guarantee it too. We put the yeeee-hawwww back in your motor and transmission.”

It’s one of the most iconic pieces of Houston pop culture, and it only cost a few hundred dollars to produce, and less than that to originally run on daytime TV, but Thunderbolt Transmission’s famous commercial doesn’t seem to show any signs of fading away from Bayou City brains.

Not even the creative minds at Sterling Cooper & Partners could come up with such an insidiously catchy jingle, circa 1980, just in time for the urban cowboy craze.

Nary a week or month goes by with someone posting the commercial on Reddit or Facebook, leading to dozens of comments and someone throwing out other Houston commercials that still litter our brains all these years.

Newstonians probably don’t know the lyrics to the Thunderbolt jingle, but for people who grew up here in the ’80s and ’90s, it’s right up there with “Deep in the Heart of Texas” or maybe Lil Troy’s “Wanna Be A Baller” from 1999.

I’d had enough of being haunted by the Thunderbolt commercial jingle for most of my life and called the automotive parts dealer on the east side of town to get the skinny.

Skip Hartley’s father, Harry, started Texas Motor Exchange after World War II to corner a market in Houston that he found was sorely underserviced, namely car engine parts.

This is when veterans were returning home from fighting Nazis with money to spend and lives to get on with. They needed cars and parts for those cars.

Harry Hartley had come to Houston from Louisiana at the age of 14 escaping trouble in his hometown. He spent a portion of his early days in Houston sleeping in the front porch swing of a church off Broadway and Harrisburg before striking out on his own with just a third grade education.

During the war, the younger Hartley says, automotive factories were still tooled up for war time and waits for car parts were long. The elder Hartley began buying up engines across Houston and found that he could make good money swapping engines. The rest is company history.

The company name turned into Thunderbolt by 1963, and briefly fall on hard times in the late ’60s before rising again.

The elder Hartley died in 1997.

In the late ’70s Hartley saw that it was time to make an innovative local commercial, something to catch the eye and the ear.

Hartley’s daughter, Bonnie Miller, worked for a local advertising agency and was looking for a way to work with the family.

She wrote the country-fried jingle and pitched it to her father. He liked it and production for the commercial soon began.

Miller also wrote the “Oooh Ahhhh” Mattress Giant jingle, which you may have also found lodged in your brain on a constant loop. She sang that one too, Hartley says.

She wrote and recorded gospel music in the area, in addition to her noted commercial work.

Sadly, Miller and her husband Phillip were both killed in a car accident on Highway 288 in 1996, just days after singing at Skip’s wedding.

“She was very simple in her ways, and just a really happy person,” Hartley says.

The budget for the original Thunderbolt commercial topped out at $250. That includes the price of the cowboy hat the pretty blonde gal (whose transmission has got her down) wears in the clip. It was bought by Hartley at a charity auction prior to production.

Growing up I always wondered about just what that blonde character did in Houston. Was she a Gilley’s groupie, maybe a Houston Oilers cheerleader, the kind you would see a faded pinup of in a western wear store? She was like a raunchier Dolly Parton, and thus I had a crush on her as a young boy. She’s a local actress whose name escapes Hartley, though he hears about her whereabouts now and then.

The younger Hartley, 51, doesn’t remember much about the day that the commercial was shot at the Harrisburg store, but he does remember how cheap it was to run on local television.

“It maybe cost $250 to make overall and it cost about $25 to run on KDOG, which is now KRIV,” said Hartley. Speedy, a Thunderbolt mechanic who taught Skip much of he knows about cars, was the man lucky enough to get a peck on the cheek from the blonde.

The ad was wildly popular in Houston and when Thunderbolt would release new commercials they would get actual complaints about not using the iconic clip instead.

“Locals didn’t like the new ones and people would call us on the phone and complain so we never made a change,” Hartley says. “They’d gripe us into running the old one.”

Local bands have even been known to cover the jingle live, and every now and then you will see an inventive Houstonian and his wife dressed as the blonde and the flimflam salesman.

Even an updated ad with Houston radio luminary Moby didn’t take off, as popular as he was in the ’80s.

In 2005, the Houston Press named it “Best Vintage Local TV Commercial,” lauding it for its romance, action, and suspense.

By 1999 Thunderbolt did decide to take another crack at the formula and remake the ad with new faces and a new car to boot. Hartley plays the mechanic in the red shirt. They even commissioned a Spanish language version, and yep, it’s just as catchy as the English language honky tonk classic, even in another tongue.

“We did know how popular the first one was, being from Houston, so we tried to be faithful to it as we could,” says Todd Reynolds with Reynolds Advertising. The ad was one of the first he did when he began his firm. The Spanish version was filmed by Reynolds around 2006.

“The Spanish one was a bit more lusty than the English language version,” says Reynolds.

He tries not to listen to the Thunderbolt jingle very much as it gets stuck in his head.

“It’s always in there,” Reynolds laughs. “It’s got that kitschy hook.”

In late 2012 Houston real estate blog Swamplot looked back at the Thunderbolt location off Harrisburg to see how much had changed over the decades.

What about a 21st century reboot? Hartley has mulled it over but has reservations. The market has changed and TV ads don’t penetrate the way they used to.

“We kick it around all the time, but you just don’t get the bang for your buck anymore with TV ads,” he says.

Maybe it could be a viral hit on YouTube or Facebook, I suggest, not entirely hiding the fact that I would want to play the shady car salesman. Skip said he will think about it.

It’s time someone put the yeeee-hawwww back in Houston, don’t you think?

Circa 1980

The 1999 Version



En Espanol