Buddy Lee

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Buddy Lee was a television commercial mascot for Lee jeans. He was a plastic baby doll dressed in an appropriately-sized red flannel shirt and blue jeans.

Typically, some hazard, usually comically minor but blown up to exaggerated standards by the intentional overacting of the human actors, would appear, prompting someone to wail something along the lines of "Who can help us now?!"

At this point, Buddy Lee would appear, posed in some dramatic and prominent fashion, with his heroic theme music soaring in the background. One of the human actors would then shout, "Look! It's Buddy Lee!"

The doll would then be hurled into harm's way, usually to its detriment, being crushed, maimed, or burnt. The commercial would then end with someone asking, in a marvelling tone, "What kind of jeans are those?", the general idea being to express how durable and damage-resistant the jeans were. Though he rarely succeeded in actually doing anything useful, at least without being almost totally destroyed in the process, people continued to be grateful for his appearance to help with their problems.

Buddy Lee commercials were campy, but not terribly overblown, maintaining a more humorous style than the later, overly camp commercials that followed it, such as those of Old Navy where the style was taken to intentionally ludicrous levels, without as much of the tongue-in-cheek tone that characterized the Buddy Lee commercials.