The commercials were, of course, a complete farce, a parody of the T&A that dominated TV in the '80s. By all accounts, they boosted sales for the brand.
But they were abruptly canceled when a group of female employees at Stroh's, which brewed Old Milwaukee at the time, filed a lawsuit that charged the commercials encouraged workplace harassment. They complained the company had done nothing to stop male brewery workers from tormenting them with lewd behavior and pornography, charges that were later settled out of court.
Whether the ad campaign actually encouraged the harassment was never established.
Today, the man behind the commercials said he has only one regret - that he was unable to give the team a fitting send-off.
"After the lawsuit, I knew [Stroh's] would kill them," said adman Patrick Scullin, who created the campaign for San Francisco's Hal Riney & Partners agency. "But I thought that, before we did, we should make lemons out of lemonade. I wanted to make one final commercial: Whatever became of the Swedish Bikini Team?"
If Scullin had had his way, football fans would've enjoyed the bikini-clad girls one last time, in a 60-second spot during Super Bowl XXVI in January 1992.
"It would have been big," he said. "But the client walked away from it, and I can't say I blamed them."
Scullin said the ads grew out of a focus group that felt Old Milwaukee was "a tired brand - your father's beer." Its ads were formulaic.
"There would be a group of guys in an outdoor setting, doing manly things," said Scullin. "Then they'd crack open a beer and declare, 'It doesn't get any better than this.'
"We had young guys watch the ads, and one says, 'If that's all the better life gets, that sucks.' That was the creative inspiration. . . . We showed it can always get better."
