The Found Footage Festival’s Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher celebrate the Madison store’s unstoppable jingle.
Ask anyone in the Madison TV market, “Where’s Jim’s Coins?” and there’s a decent chance they’ll give you the right answer. They might not know the exact location, but they can tell you for sure that it’s in Hilldale. This communal knowledge is owed to the Jim’s Coins TV ad and its jingle, a short and sweet little song that gets directly to the point.
As it turns out, the jingle also provides a solid jumping-off point for remixes, as demonstrated by a recently released collection of alternate takes on the tune. The remixes, which were compiled by the Found Footage Festival, span genres including synth wave, funk, ska, punk, dub, blues, hip-hop, and hardcore. One remix positions Jim’s Coins in the middle of a Jan Hammer-inspired sweeping synth score suitable for a Michael Mann production. Another reduces Jim’s Coins to a haunting piano melody. Monster Mike’s “People Can Enjoy Coins (Movie Trailer Mix)” chops up the Jim’s Coins ad copy to create a numismatist narrative.
The Jim’s Coins jingle and its accompanying commercial are wonderful and should enjoy nationwide acclaim. But because of its localness, it remains somewhat esoteric. So, how does something like Jim’s Coins inspire a global community to apply its talents toward lifting a jingle to new heights? It starts with VCR Party, a weekly YouTube series where Wisconsin-born comedians (and Found Footage Fest masterminds) Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher guide a tour through funny and obscure VHS clips. The show features a segment highlighting the most toe-tappingest jingles from across the country, in a search for the “official” jingle from each state. Prueher said they picked the (save big money at) Menards song for Wisconsin from a field that included Rocky Rococo and Brothers Main. Their friend Gabe Gronli, a Madison native who writes for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, pointed out the glaring omission of Jim’s Coins.
Prueher says they added Jim’s Coins to a run-off election and it didn’t win, but he and Pickett soon became obsessed with the jingle. And so did VCR Party‘s fans, affectionately called The Melindas, who often send in remixes of jingles featured on the show, and dramatically increased their output for Jim’s Coins.
“Once we got a couple from Jim’s Coins we were like, ‘More. We want more,'” Prueher says.
Pickett says viewers came out of the woodwork for the Jim’s Coins remix challenge, resulting in the 20 different tracks found on the project’s Bandcamp page.
All the Jim’s Coins love on VCR Party caught the attention of an employee at Jim’s Coins and he told the store’s owner, Jim Essence.
“The employee reached out to us and said, ‘Jim is into this, if you ever want to have him on as a judge,’ and we were like, fuck yeah,” Pickett says.
Essence ended up attending a Found Footage Festival event in Madison in December, meeting with both Pickett and Prueher, and agreeing to judge a contest to pick the best Jim’s Coins remix. The event will eventually end up on FFF’s YouTube channel either as a VCR Party episode or as a one-off special. Pickett has already purchased a precious coin from Jim’s collection, and it will be bestowed upon the winner.
The groundswell of grassroots support for the Jim’s Coins jingle is disproportionate to the song’s actual duration. The joyous community response nicely contradicts the image of Jim’s employees, who Pickett says look a little like hostages when they appear at the end of the TV spot. But as both Pickett and Prueher point out, there’s just something a little different about Jim’s Coins that makes it so endearing.
“I don’t even remember where I first heard it, I just knew that I knew it. It’s almost omnipresent in Madison,” says Pickett, who blames “pop-culture osmosis” for spreading the Jim’s Coins gospel. “Somehow everybody knows it.”
Pickett and Prueher will also be in Madison on April 18 for two back-to-back Wisconsin Film Festival screenings of a new documentary, Chop & Steele. Directed by Ben Steinbauer and Berndt Mader, the doc commemorates a running prank in which Pickett and Prueher appeared on local morning news shows pretending to be an incredibly silly duo of fitness gurus, and the ridiculous lawsuit that followed.
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