That's why I wasn't going to eat it and had already thrown it away:
"New ad not big hit with the original Anthony" by Billy Baker | Globe Staff, September 25, 2013
In the summer of 1969, when he was 12 years old, Anthony Martignetti was discovered on a North End street by producers who cast him to star in the iconic “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day” TV ad.
In the spot, an actress playing his mother yells “Anthony! Anthony!” from a window on Powers Court, and he runs home through the streets for dinner as a narrator tells viewers, “Anthony Martignetti lives in Boston, in the Italian North End.” The commercial aired for 13 years in the Northeast, from the summer of Woodstock and the moon landing all the way to the Reagan era, exposing and defining the North End to the outside world. It made Martignetti, who had moved from Italy with his family just a few years prior, into a local icon and made “Anthony!” a name that had to be yelled.
But lately, the commercial everyone keeps asking Martignetti about is a new one, a remake for Prince’s 100th anniversary where a new little “Anthony” runs home. When he opens the door, he’s a grown man. Played by an actor.
“I’m disappointed. Everyone keeps calling me and saying ‘It’s a fake, it’s a fraud,’” the original Anthony Martignetti said recently as he led his 9-year-old son on the “Anthony! Anthony!” tour of the North End. Martignetti lives in West Roxbury now, where he works as a court officer at Dedham District Court, as well as part-time at a local BJs, and his son lives with his mother in New Jersey.
“It was a good commercial, but it could have been a great one. If you make a sequel, you always get the original cast.”
But what bothers him most about the remake is that they didn’t cast his son to play the young Anthony.
“They loved him at the audition and they didn’t give it to him,” he said, and added that while he was taking his son through the audition process — something he learned about through a co-worker whose daughter acts in commercials — they never mentioned they were casting for an adult Anthony. He learned that when a man opened the door at the end of the commercial, a man who was not him.
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David Heimbecker, the senior director of marketing at New World Pasta, a Pennsylvania company that owns the Prince brand and manufactures the product in St. Louis, said they’ve heard a lot of people question why they didn’t use the original Anthony. “What we’re tying to do is talk about that character and the spirit of the North End and not tie it to the actor. Then the actor becomes bigger than the character they were meant to portray,” he said, noting that the “Anthony Martignetti” character has been portrayed by a few different kids since 1969, including a reboot in the 90s. “It was simply based on reenacting the character, not trying to play off some history of the actors themselves.”
Martignetti says he doesn’t want to sound bitter, but being asked why he’s not in the new commercial has become as common as hearing people yell his name....
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Coincidentally, it is time for lunch.
