The Wild Rainiers return: the power of novelty and hometown nostalgia
Among the final few documentaries showing during The Pickford Film Center’s annual Doctober festival was “Rainier: A Beer Odyssey.” In the film, Tacoma director Isaac Olsen divulges the lore behind the 1970s ad campaign that put Rainier Beer back in business at a time when Seattle’s job scarcity threatened to close the brewery altogether.
Picture this: It’s 1974 and a commercial comes on in a location that looks a lot like Washington state. An old Volvo slows as the windshield wipers work to clear the raindrops in what looks like a mountain pass. An excited mother tells her children to look out the window. Suddenly, a six-pack of human-sized Rainier Beer bottles with spandex-shrouded legs gallop with deer-like movements across the screen.
Right then and there, Washingtonians make room in their hearts next to Bigfoot for a new local beast, The Wild Rainier.
“The Wild Rainiers” were a series of advertisements written and created by co-workers who had met through their shared contribution to the 1960s Seattle Magazine, lovingly deemed, “the thorn in the side of the establishment,” by writer Ed Leimbacher for the magazine’s articles on rock and roll culture and racy photography. The magazine shut down in 1970, leaving the rat pack of advertising —Terry Heckler, Leimbacher, Gordon Bowker and Frank Denman — available for a new venture.
At the time of the Rainier Beer campaign, Seattle was reeling from its largest employer, Boeing, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Between 1970 and 1971 Boeing laid off more than 50,000 employees, suddenly leaving Seattle out of work. “It caused tremendous pain for people our parents’ age,” says comedian John Keister in the film, “ …but for those of us who had just graduated high school, the city was like a playground.
All this creativity started bubbling up. It unleashed all this freedom.” The combination of Seattlites leaving the city in hopes of new economic prosperity and the lack of financial security of those who stayed created one of the best facilitators of innovation among the young: boredom.
The monotony and pressure of the economic crisis were shifted by the making of a local icon. The anti-establishment spirit of the writers’ previous work together on Seattle Magazine and the freedom that comes from loss transferred to Rainier Beer’s advertising.
Throwing out the accepted rules of commercialism, the writers often ignored the customary visible logos and images of perfectly foamy beer being poured into perfectly chilled cups. Instead, Heckler Associates juxtaposed scenes of fishermen, mountainscapes and a motorcyclist with silly skits of human-sized beer bottles gallivanting, ribbiting frogs croaking “Rainier” and Mickey Rooney leading a group of hunters in search of The Wild Rainiers. The campaign spoke to the frontier attitude of early Washington, its proclivity for the great outdoors and a shared silliness that comes from hard work.
Heckler names this balancing act: “The word you’re looking for is novel. And the human reaction to novelty is to smile.”
The Wild Rainiers — actors in human-sized beer cans — became mascots for the celebrity beer. The advertisements became inside jokes among locals and on Fat Tuesday in 1977, three years into the ad campaign, Seattlites gathered by the thousands to watch the running of The Wild Rainiers as they migrated through Pioneer Square.
The advertisements were successful at a time when novelty felt like rebellion against the pressure of economic scarcity. Young people who were new to advertisement invited locals to participate in the spirit of the Northwest through laughter.
A tallboy and two raccoons walk into a bar …
Across the state, Rainier Beer is no longer one of the top sellers. It’s outsold by large beer conglomerates like Bud Light and Coors Light. But here in Bellingham, Rainier Beer remains beloved. In 2023, The Cabin Tavern, nicknamed by patrons as simply The Cabin, made the top 10 Rainier Beer sellers in the country.
The Cabin’s theme is similar to if not directly inspired by Rainier Beer’s ad campaign. When customers walk through the doors on a Tuesday night, they are greeted by the sound of Vinyl DJ Tom Farrell playing Jack Eubank’s “Guitar Sounds of the South,” as a symphony of Rainier cans crack open, punctuating the sweet cowboy songs.
While ordering, patrons face the back of the bar decorated with mountain landscape paintings and taxidermy raccoons canoeing above a backlit Rainier “R” with a plaque boasting, “Top Rainier Sales In America #9, 2023.”
Novelty is imbued in the decorations of every corner, from those canoeing raccoons to miniature Rainier Beer cans on legs. Tomfoolery and ridiculousness seem to speak to college kids and old-timers alike. What is new to the youngsters may be familiar to generations of locals who saw the Rainier Beer ads on their televisions back in the 1970s.
Put together, the novel and the familiar create the same beloved recipe made by Heckler Associates that made a local hero out of Rainier Beer.
— By Mickey Mann