The little angels of Camay

Loving Pink: the little angels of Camay

Fraish from the cow!

"Fraishness itself! That's Cahnation fraish milk at its best  in nourishment. Straight from the dairy, Cahnation fraish milk is fraish today and every day. Rushed to your door and to your store. Have a glass of fraishness itself. Drink Cahnation fraish milk with Vitamin D added, the milk children love the flavor of, in the red and white carton."

I wish I could get a fix on this accent, for it's one I've heard more times than I can count. It's always American, of course - a Canadian never heard of "fraish" anything, not even a Tim Horton's doughnut (and here I use the classical spelling and punctuation). The "Cahnation" part seems to say Boston or at least New England, but I always thought the weird bending of the short e into something more like "aiee" came from the Midwest. This might just be the most extreme example I've heard, but I remember Clark Gable talking like this in Gone with the Wind (see clip below, around 0:40 - he says "fayyshun" for "fashion") and even my beloved Harold Lloyd, whose Nebraskan roots sometimes showed themselves later in life (as accents are wont to do). If I could pin down where these actors came from - . And I recently heard a woman do it, too, if I could just remember who she was. It was really extreme! 

You no doubt noticed that "fraish" or "fraishness" appears six times in thirty seconds in that Carnation Milk ad. Then as now, that's about average for advertisement. 

Vintage TV ads: in twenty seconds or less!

As usual, this was a process. For reasons unknown, something popped into my head today. Years ago, in a compilation of "classic" TV ads, I saw a very brief spot for a certain type of cooker that I hadn't seen before. I just remembered that the announcer was British, and the cooker cooked things at some sort of supernatural speed. You could do a chicken in 5 seconds or something. I also remembered the type of energy used was weird - thermonuclear or something? Thermodynamic? Convectional? I could NOT remember the name, only the weird feeling it gave me, as if it would emit radiation or something.

It took a lot of googling and search terms and switching back and forth from YouTube to Google images, but I finally found it - and I knew I would recognize the name the minute I saw it! It was INFRARED. For some reason, the idea of an infrared cooker scared the hell out of me. It sounded like it should come with its own Geiger counter.

Once I knew the name of it, it wasn't hard to find the ad on YouTube. It was the same one, except I had remembered it a little bit wrong, as something with a glass dome. In truth, it's a sort of prototype for the George Foreman grill, or one of those thingies that awful Southern lady pushes in the infomercials.

Having noticed how mercifully brief the ad was, I thought: what if I did a whole post on ten-second-long "classic" commercials? I didn't get too far. Soon I was up to 20 seconds. Most of them are at least within 30.  I love things that get right to the point.

BLOGGER'S DISCOVERY! NOW I know what I was thinking about! I must have conflated (if that's the word) the British infrared cooker ad with a "vision of the year 2000" video in Russian (or Polish or Czech). It featured an infrared cooker with a glass dome, which claims to cook a chicken in a few seconds or less.

Like this.

While a Chesterfield burns

Tell me, folks. Are your gifs running a little slow and jerky? Mine are too, sort of, which is some sort of indication I'm not supposed to be posting 15 or 20 of them a day. Some are huge files, too, and I can't predict when that's going to happen. I'm at the mercy of Giphy, Makeagif and a new one called Facegarage (don't ask, but it made all those evangelical weight loss ones, so it's OK) and their individual peccadilloes. It's been my experience that gif programs are designed to break down sooner or later, especially the better ones. (Can you say Gifsforum?)

Speaking of peccadilloes. The image of a well-coiffed woman blowing out a langorous lungful of ignited tobacco leaves was once considered not only classy and elegant, but sexy. Coughing your lungs out in a pulmonary ward isn't. But who knew? So long as there was a smile in your smoking.

All these ads talk about "flavour". No one talks about the flavour/taste of a cigarette any more. In fact, no one talks about them period, because the whole subject has become taboo. But in these ads, people savoured their smokes with something like erotic pleasure. I do remember that stale, ghastly smell lingering on for hours, getting into your clothes and hair. And I never smoked.

At a certain point in the 1950s, health statistics began to come out that alarmed the big tobacco guys, so they rushed out ads that made their product seem safer. Figures were bandied about. "Recessed" filters made your smoke "cooler", "less irritating to the throat". Percentages, quarter-inches, mentions of tar and nicotene were reassuring to customers because, obviously, this little filter thingie here, this RECESSED filter, would take all the danger out of smoking. One ad even went so far as to say, "I want a treat, not a treatment". The guy would probably go on to get many treatments before the end.

Eventually, the real statistics leaked out: filters, low-tar-and-nicotene tobacco blends, and all that horseshit made not one bit of difference. Smoking cigarettes could be lethal, and there seemed to be no safe level. No one talks about smoking one or two cigarettes a day any more, because the assumption is that everyone is heavily addicted and blows through a pack or two a day.

And we won't get into the cost. I don't know how anyone can afford to smoke these days, but people buy tobacco before they buy food, so I guess it must be, uh, er, kind of addictive after all. The packages all have horrific warnings all over them, and photos of rotten lungs and people smoking through holes in their throats. I guess it happens.

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.

Smokers who know. . . now smoke the Big O!

Pure white. . flavor tight!

Bu-sy day, bu-sy day, bu-sy day

It's VULVA, not "Volvo"!

In finding an illustration for today's strange topic, I had to pick from a bunch of different Edsel ads. One was much more esthetically pleasing than this one and showed the car sweeping through a pair of opening gates, with harp glissandos and announcers saying if you had an Edsel, you were showing the world "you've arrived!" The only reason I didn't use it is that it was transferred from film stock that had gone bad, all pink and bleary like a particularly nasty eye infection.

Lots of these things have arrived in auto graveyards, but some people are refurbishing them and putting them in car shows. The fact that it is quite possibly the most hideous automobile ever made does not deter them. In fact it seems to lend them a certain exotic charm.

Having a 1958 Edsel in perfect condition is kind of like having a set of Nazi medals that look "like new". Like, who'd want to?

People have posed various theories about the Edsel, why the intensive and supposedly foolproof ad campaign fell so flat. Was the timing wrong for a new luxury car? Was it too pricey for the typical-average-American-family-of-the-'50s-who-wanted-a-new-car-every-2-years-but-couldn't-always-afford-it-because-Mom-spent-too-much-on-her-effing-manicures? Did it, like the infamous Jaguar, refuse to start?

No, it was just butt-ugly and that's all there is to say about it. Looking at it now sets my teeth on edge: it has a face on it like a robot from Hell.

It looks hostile. It looks aggressive. It looks like some good ol' boy fired up on corn squeezin's and toting a slingshot and a bag o'rocks.

YICK.

The more I watched this video, which I picked for the elegant chrome-laden, turquoise-and-white decor that sums up the '50s, the more I realized it wasn't an Edsel ad at all, but some guy driving his vintage Edsel with some other guy filming it. The other guy's rear-view mirror just kept showing and the cars in the other lanes were too recent. But I don't want to change it cuz the other ads all run about 8 1/2 minutes and feature Bing Crosby, and I couldn't stand that, I'd have a seizure on the spot. It's bad enough even thinking about these automotive nightmares.

This is the kind-of-a-thing that caused Stephen King to write that, you know, that BOOK, and inspired nightmarish TV shows like My Mother the Car.

The name Edsel has come to be synonymous with failure on a great and embarrassing level. But there's so much ugly on it, let's call it Synonymous with Shit-awful, old, chromy, boxy, monster-faced Car-Ideas that whoever thought of it should have shoved so far down their throat it would come out the other side. Or something like that.

Coda. I hate research more than I hate worms, but I had to include this tasty snippet from Wiki:

The Edsel is best remembered for its trademark "horsecollar" or toilet seat grille, which was quite distinct from other cars of the period. According to a popular joke at the time, the Edsel "resembled an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon".^[11] Some have speculated that the car failed to sell because its grille resembled a vulva.^[12]

The Edsel's front-end ensemble as it eventually appeared bore little resemblance, if any, to the original concept. Roy Brown, the original chief designer on the Edsel project, had envisioned a slender, almost delicate opening in the center. Engineers, fearing engine cooling problems, vetoed the intended design, which led to the now-infamous "horsecollar."

(Hey! That's vulva to you, mister!)