Each time I read about brass instruments, like those trumpets, the Grand Champions jingle mentally starts playing in my head. Image via Wikipedia

“It’s A Small World.” The Kit-Kat jingle. Even “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Most of us are frustrated with musical songs that permanently or near-permanently ground themselves in our heads and it takes ages to coax them out. Derived from a German root, the earworm is to describe such songs. Most of them have been since the rise of the television set utilized to accompany advertisements. Speaking of which, I was a 90’s kid, when an abundance of toys for my own gender, usually in the likes of arts and crafts like Fantastic (fill in the blank) or Treasure Rocks.

So, what aspect of the 1990’s ushered such an earworm to permanently lodge itself in my head? A now-21 year-old toy horse model company used to roll out their infectious commercials to air on kids’ television, once home to high-quality cartoons and much less anime than the current times. To add insult to injury, the ad jingle blared out of the built-in speakers of my television sets back in New Jersey, “Grand Champions – the most beautiful horses in the world!”

As a former child of the 90’s, I fell victim to the Alpha International equestrian playset series’ advertising jingles. A few mere years after my move to Florida, I was reading about anything with brass instruments, and all of a sudden, that Grand Champions jingle returned. I tried not to think about it, let alone assured myself that this was the new millennium and those ads were 1995. I’m not the only person suffering an earworm – a 2003 study found that songs not mentioned in 2-10 were number one in the earworm chart, backed by researchers. Also, it noted that musicians and females have a tendency to fall victim to the earworm disease, and as a female and a former school musician, I have to live with that Grand Champions jingle stuck in my head. It seems as if the brain itch, like autism, is everlasting. Whenever I read about brass instruments or anything related to them, that jingle rears its equine head, mane attached.

Fans of the said toy horse company can visit grandchampions.com, but do it with the volume down and in your own privacy – you may discover someone feeling the pain of the slogan-jingle-turned-earworm just as I did in the 90’s. If any lyric fits the intermittently-and-mentally-playing Grand Champions ad jingle, to me it would sound like “Brass instruments – the most beautiful music in the world!”