Retro commerical – Own a piece of the Skydome in Toronto

Credit: Wikipedia Commons

You need a little history lesson on the Skydome, now the Rogers Centre, to know just how sad and stupid this commercial from 1989 is. The stadium was built largely with government funds to house the baseball team the Toronto Blue Jays. Huge costs overruns, pushed the cost to C$570 million ($884 million in 2011 dollars), well beyond original estimates of C$150 million. Stuck with a white elephant that struggled to even meet its interest payments, on November 1998, the stadium filed for bankruptcy protection. In 2004, Rogers Communications, the parent company of the Blue Jays, bought SkyDome for about whopping  $25 million – about 4% of the cost of construction. What a great deal for Rogers and the taxpayers get hosed again!