Ron Popeil was the sizzle of American ingenuity, personified

These immediate forebears of home-shopping channels and, beyond them, the content marketing techniques of the 21st century were where Ron Popeil, an American original who gave the world the word “Ronco” and died Wednesday at 86, thrived.

He would call his babies by affectionate names (The Popeil Electric Pasta-Sausage Maker became, simply, “Pasta-Sausage”), and he was known to say things like, “I created the jerky category.” Now and then he would drift into Shatner-style staccato to make his points: “A child!

As 20th century as he was — a Chicago open-market barker who used TV to propel himself toward success — he also saw the possibilities that were just ahead and are now playing out in the fragmented 21st century, an era when all media blends into one big glop and advertising becomes content, then becomes advertising again.

When Dan Aykroyd sent him up on “Saturday Night Live” in 1976 with the “Bass-O-Matic” commercial parody, Popeil realized it was free publicity, just as he did when “Weird Al” Yankovic recorded a parody song.

In that profile, Popeil demonstrated how “GLH-9” was doing on the bald spot on the back of his scalp after several hours, some of them under a shopping channel’s blistering lights.

What didn’t make it into the story was that Popeil exhorted the visiting journalist: “Touch it.

Interludes like that — in-person interactions that felt like moments in an infomercial — help explain the reverse: moments in his infomercials that felt like in-person interactions.

In the 1990s, you completely bought the notion that if Ron Popeil could stand there, on the set of his infomercial, and make a delectable sausage of fresh salmon, dill, soy and crushed red pepper in two minutes, that somehow you could too.

Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, spent several days with Ron Popeil for an AP profile on him in 1997