Ngl, I’ve always had a suspicion that part of the reason the extra blades happened was the satire.

Once the idea was introduced, half the marketing was done, and the association with laughter isn’t a bad thing. You let the joke fade, and the idea lingers. You see the product launch, and even if you recall exactly how absurd it was when you saw it on snl or whatever, it’s still a positive memory. The satire commercial acted as a real commercial before the product existed.

Obviously, there’s an upper limit to it, and I think they’ve hit it as no six blade heads have come out that I know of. But, being real, after 5 blades, all the satires jumped to unrealistic numbers and more extreme silliness. It was like the various comedy writers figured out that the various razor companies would be glad to slap one more on there, and sell it as an entirely new thing that needed a new handle as well. So they said (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ and went hard.

There used to be a video of the satire commercials followed by the eventual real ones. I couldn’t find it on YouTube, but I may just suck at searching there, or it could have gotten pulled. I dunno, but I remember the real commercials being way closer to the satire ones than I had thought when it happened.