Antelope Valley’s 30 Seconds of Fame

The latest television commercials pitching Levi’s 501 jeans show various teen-agers simply hanging out. Music plays in the background. A few cars and motorcycles are thrown in for good measure.

Each 30-second spot is set in a different part of the country, as announced across the screen at the beginning of the ad: Boston. Chicago. Houston. Antelope Valley.

Antelope Valley?

Yes, one of the sites chosen by Levi Strauss & Co. to glorify its blue jeans is that wasteland of fashion that lies just north of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Antelope Valley . . . not exactly the desert home of denim. It doesn’t even have a Gap store.

“I’m not sure we were after hip. We wanted to show kids where they grow up, and kids having a good time,” said Alan Jewett, a senior vice president of Foote, Cone & Belding, the San Francisco firm that creates Levi’s ads. “It just happened that the director thought he could do something with that location.”

The commercials attempt to “capture what regular, everyday life is like” for American teen-agers. The Chicago spot focuses on a 15-year-old saxophone player. In Boston, a young artist and a ballerina cavort. Another commercial follows a group of teen-agers along Hollywood Boulevard.

Antelope Valley’s version shows four boys outside an abandoned gas station. They have erected a giant slingshot which they use to fling stuffed animals skyward. One of the boys, positioned in an adjacent field, attempts to catch the airborne toys in a bucket.

Chicago gets a jazz prodigy. Antelope Valley gets social misfits.

“No message was intended there,” Jewett said. “It was just a fun idea that somebody cooked up.”

Community leaders in Palmdale and Lancaster, the twin capitals of Antelope Valley, denied that local youths are spending their afternoons catapulting teddy bears. The officials were tickled, however, to learn that their homeland’s name was appearing on nationwide television.

You see, plenty of movies and television shows get made in Antelope Valley. It’s convenient by freeway from Hollywood and can double for just about any desert on the globe. And, Antelopians boast, the forested mountains around Lake Hughes and Lake Elizabeth look remarkably like Colorado when viewed through a movie camera.

But, this is the first time that Antelope Valley has received top-billing. And for some deserted gas station, at that.

“We’re very, very proud,” said Stephanie Abrahamson, chairwoman of the Antelope Valley Film Commission. “We certainly couldn’t have afforded this sort of thing for a tourism commercial.”

None of Antelope Valley’s leaders had actually seen the commercial, which was filmed in 1989 and began running last summer during such prime-time programs as “Roseanne,” “Cheers” and “Alf.” And, of course, on MTV. The spots will continue through the end of July, when they will be replaced.

Maybe Canyon Country will get some air time.