adrian holovaty

September 1, 2005, 1:57 AM ET

I've got something for you

I've been generally bummed-out over the past couple of days about Hurricane Katrina and the devastation in and around New Orleans. But today I stumbled across something completely unrelated that made me genuinely ecstatic.

It might even be the best news I've seen all year.

A staple of Chicagoland television, the Eagle Man commercial, has been made available online.

This is, hands-down, the finest television commercial ever made. It has a cult following here, having been aired on local TV stations since (at least) the early 1990s. (Probably earlier?)

Off and on, I have been looking for this thing in digital format for years. Years. At one point I had even e-mailed Eagle Insurance to see if they'd send me a VHS copy of the commercial, all expenses paid. No response.

(Yes, I could have set my VCR to tape some random channels at random intervals. But I couldn't justify that much effort.)

Although it's been modified slightly from the original version -- it now includes slightly more advanced computer graphics, a different Eagle Man voice and a reference to a Web site -- it's still close enough to the original version to make me giddy.

Here's a direct link to the video.

Now, if somebody could Web-post the Victory Auto Wreckers commercial that has been airing on Chicago TV since the early 1980s...

UPDATE: I found the Victory Auto Wreckers commercial, along with a newspaper article about it.