Monday, March 7, 2016

So mild, so pure: TV ads in the '50s




I find that early '50s TV ads make the most intriguing gifs. Advertising style was pretty aggressive then, as nobody quite knew how to marry pictures with sound. Announcers intoned in radio-like voices, with that strange theatrical diction from the 1940s that somehow suggests the formal urgency of wartime.

One of the features of these ads is very (VERY) strange animation, much of it primitive or downright incomprehensible. On very early TV shows, credits were written on some sort of material like canvas and pulled along manually, or cards dropped down with a "flop".  All this is of great fascination to me, as I have vague memories of some of the later-'50s ones, though as a small child (infant!), I had no real comprehension of them. Ads got a lot more sophisticated in the early '60s, and by mid-to-late they were sort of quirky and self-consciously nutty/hippie-ish in a painful effort to be hip.

Here is one of those offputting animations from Birdseye. Frozen food was still kind of a novelty then, and the icebox was a thing of the past. There are even a few ads for frost-free refrigerators, which I didn't have until the 80s! I do remember those pans of hot water and the chisel used to hack out 3"-thick slabs of frosted ice that had been there for years. Once I managed to gouge the inside of the freezer and release freon gas all over the place, necessitating a visit from a repairman. Very nasty.




People don't realize how literally in-your-face TV ads were then. Everything was blasted at you, often spinning around like those newspaper headlines in 1940s gangster movies. This ad talks about "blueing" (I think that's how you spell it), which I am not even familiar with, but I think it was an ingredient added when washing white laundry to keep it from yellowing. Cheer was revolutionary in that it incorporated all that lovely blueing, which is even now endangering species and killing fish in their billions.




One of the big obsessions of the 1950s was nutrition/sturdy health and helping your children build strong bodies - eight ways in this ad, but later on, twelve. This is, of course, an ad for Wonder Bread, a product wildly popular in the post-boom era and later satirized as the epitome of Eisenhower-ish blandness and WASP-y insularity/xenophobia. In this ad, a skinny kid, the equivalent of the guy who gets sand kicked in his face, discovers the nutritional wonders of Wonder Bread and begins to stuff himself with it. Soon he begins to win medals in track and field. I am still searching for that iconic (sorry, but it is) ad where the kid grows in height from toddler to adulthood in about three seconds. Haven't found it yet, but it took me ten years to find "Mother, please! I'd rather do it myself!", so it's only a matter of time.




Variations on the theme of nutrition. Back then, people actually did pay attention to what was in their food, but it had nothing to do with additives. In fact, the more additives, the better the product. In this case, Billy's animal friends are blasting messages at him about various nutrients, though very strangely, from the pages of a huge book
.



Billy blinking. These animations could be drawn in a single swipe of the pen, and probably were. Disney they weren't, but somehow they got the message across. In fact, I really like this one. Most gifs aren't that smooth and circular.




This is a real gem, with exceptionally primitive animation. Looks like a background being manually dragged across the screen, with cutout heads superimposed. Palmolive shows up a lot in these ad compilations. The name itself makes me feel ickily oily. I don't know if there was olive oil or palm oil in these products or not, but the name is somehow claustrophobic and "close". Suffocating, almost, and definitely oleaginous. It brings to mind Polly Bergen and her revolting "Oil of the Turtle" products, about which I can find practically nothing (though if I check the internet in a few months, there will be seventeen different sites devoted to it).




I like this, because even though nothing happens in it, it has that shakiness and graininess I prize. I'm not sure why everything jerked up and down like this, but it did. Often there was a ten- or even fifteen-second freeze on a picture of the product at the end of these ads.




I'm afraid I lost track of what product this was, but I thought it was delightfully bizarre. It uses the same animation techniques as Francis the Talking Mule and those "I want a Clark Bar" ads. 

One of the things I notice, as I watch these late at night, is how long they are. Most are a full minute, and some are several minutes (especially car commercials, which last an eternity and all seem the same to me, as if the cars are interchangeable). If that doesn't seem very long, try watching a one-minute ad. Just when you think it's winding up, it starts all over again. We are subjected to anywhere from four to ten ads in one minute now, with some of them lasting mere seconds, jamming ten times the information into our already-overburdened brains.




I'm not saying it was "better" then. Children could get polio and black people were barred from hotels and women were expected to stay in the kitchen and defrost their freezers. Life was simpler and slower, for sure. I've always been able to read at light speed, with the result of feeling like everyone/everything else was moving very slowly around me, as in that Star Trek episode where there were two frequencies. I like the internet because it's hyper-fast, and you can get information about pretty much anything in seconds.




But then I find myself watching these ancient ads and giffing them. I gif mainly because sitting through a one-minute commercial seems interminable. So here, I give you only the best parts! A lot of people simply hate gifs because they only see the dreadful, jerky two-second ones that almost everyone makes. And why? Why make such crappy ones? I don't know. I used to go on a site called Gifsforum - but never mind, it's dead and buried now. When I find old Gifsforum gifs I made years ago, they are epics, going forwards and backwards, at three different speeds, with colour turned to sepia or black and white, and on and on. Special effects. My grandkids can do stuff on their ipods that is light-years ahead of this: put themselves in rock videos with stop motion, lip-synching, kaleidoscopic visual effects, and all sorts of stuff, while these poky little twenty-second movies seem unimpressive.

But they save you time. If you want the nugget of something, gif it. That's what I always say. Squawk, squawk, squawk.








POST-BLOG GLOB. I decided to gif an entire one-minute ad here, because of the unusual clarity of it and because it epitomizes food ads from the era, especially products for children like cereal and bread. Remember Grape Nuts? If you don't, you're lucky. They were hard, granular bullets that were about as appetizing as Purina Dog Chow. No doubt they had no more protein (an obsession with these ads, often pronounced "protean" as if it had mythological powers) than a bowl of wood shavings. But this ad also incorporates the fatigued child being dragged off to eat cereal, which solves everything and makes for a hap-hap-happy family!

Were families happier then? I don't know. I look back on that time as golden, and have dreams of Chatham that are almost ecstatic, though at least from age ten I know I was miserable. Before that, who knows? Milk was delivered by horse-and-wagon, and ads looked something like this. We ate Grape Nuts and got our protean, and built strong bodies, either eight or twelve ways. At least the pace was slower, and people could sit still for a whole 60 seconds at a time.


Sunday, March 6, 2016

Warm tip: a literal translation




(The following are instructions for cleaning a Pusheen stuffed animal, which I am thinking of ordering from a Third World vendor. One of my literally-translated gems.)

warm tip]
Maintenance and cleaning method of plush toys
Plush dirty, not easy to clean after washing and easy to curl. A simple method without water.
To the market to buy a bag of large grain of salt (also known as the sun and salt, about 2 kg), home after looking for a clean plastic bag (to be able to
Hold), then take a small amount of Oshio placed in plastic bags, you're going to get rid of inside, the bag mouth department good, began to make
Strong shaking, about 40 times, out of plush toys, the surface sticky salt particle shaking clean, you will find the salt black hair.
Cashmere toys clean a lot of.
This is because the salt itself with a plus or minus, and dirt will have a positive and negative charge, the friction of the friction, the opposite sex, salt
Will the dirt away, the plush toys clean
Will not be lost hair?
Each one is not lost hair, but because the toy is mostly plush fabric, processing will have a lot of floating hair stuck in the above, we send
Before all the workers took it with a vacuum cleaner to suck, but the daily delivery volume is too big, we do not have a bear to suck on a half
Days, so you receive the above number is still possible to have a bit of the hair, as long as the suction or blowing machine with a vacuum cleaner
, also can be outside a good pat on the no, if it is a hair with hand gently pull will fall, and has been falling,
Is not Yo, the hair is not good treatment, floating hair can be dealt with.


Thursday, March 3, 2016

Bob Dylan's auction: give me a buck apiece!




Spam I am






Last night, very late, I got into a Thing, and as usual when I am into a Thing, I don't stop until it feels complete. Which this never will be, because it's one of the big themes/obsessions of this blog.

Old ads. Gifs of old ads, so you won't need to watch all of it. Lots of people say "I hate gifs", and I will tell you why. 90% of the ones I see on "real" sites are about 2 seconds long, a near-violent jerking back-and-forth of figures. I don't even know why those are considered "real" gifs, as it is now easy as hell to make 20- or 30-second ones with utterly simple programs like Makeagif or Giphy:

http://makeagif.com/youtube-to-gif

https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker

These.

Some time ago I found a wonderful YouTube channel called MattTheSaiyan, featuring mostly classic ads like the ones I giffed last night. The ones I chose to gif (and I herein present only about half of them) struck some kind of a chord with me, either from familiarity or just plain oddness. It's a weird feeling to see an ad you haven't seen since you watched Queen for a Day when you were seven. Why do we remember these things? As a rule, we were forced to watch them over and over again.

Kind of like these gifs.





One category I particularly like are VERY old ads, probably done live in the middle of a variety show. MattTheSaiyan's ads are edited from reels/videos/DVDs of early television. The "boooop" of an organ is often heard at the beginning of them, indicating live soap operas. An announcer will come on and earnestly present the ad. "Crawls" back then looked like they were mounted on rolls of paper or canvas, and were very likely cranked by hand.




Early advertising was very "in your face", in that someone had finally discovered that TV was not just radio with still pictures. Things MOVED on TV, so suddenly, in the ads, everything was moving. Dove's "1/4 cleansing cream" was so much a part of their ads for so long that I had to include it here along with all the lovely doves. Interestingly enough, Dove now claims that women should think they're beautiful no  matter what they look like. They should, too - as long as they use Dove products.





A lot of the gifs I made last night went to 20 seconds, and really, those are better-quality and more essay-like than these short ones. But they can run a bit weary after a while, if you're not a real afficionado. This is the short version of the Joy ad, the best part really, illustrating that in-your-face, literally explosive quality.




I love this one, and was quite impressed with it when I first saw it. From radiant bathing beauty to radioactivelly CLEAN beauty to. . . bride. It all fits together, doesn't it? If you smell this good, you're going to land a (preferably-rich) husband for sure.




This is a nice one, if a bit vertigo-inducing. Things are literally comin'-atcha. I have a feeling this was a 1950s ad. It's as if they're visually turning up the volume.




I've saved the best 'til last. Who of my generation doesn't remember all these recipes, usually made with Spam or one of its knockoffs (Spork, Klik, Bluggh, etc.) Scraps of pig-snout from the butcher's floor were ground up with plenty of fat as a binding agent. And there you had it: a perfect meat substitute. Spam and eggs! Spam on the barbecue! Spam with pineapple rings (my life is now flashing before my eyes!), and - oh God - Spam with cloves and brown sugar glaze on it, baked in the oven like a ham.

You could do anything to it that you would do to a ham. So says the ad. It was cheep, this Treet. It opened with a key, like a sardine can. And the strange thing is, fried up golden or baked in the oven, it really wasn't too bad. Kind of like really deluxe army rations. Beat the hell out of creamed chipped beef on toast.