How mild, how mild, how mild can a cigarette be?

Unusually short for a 1950s ad. This came out back when TV was "radio with pictures", and every ad had a chorus singing the jingle. This one is so gorgeous, I can see how people were seduced into smoking. Camels, smoke Camels. . . 

"Mild" was, of course, code for "doesn't cause cancer". Lots of people think there was no public awareness of the link between smoking and fatality back then, but there was. Lots of it. A stern warning had been published in Reader's Digest, not exactly an alarmist publication, and very widely read and trusted. It's just that the cigarette companies systematically drowned out people's fears with outrageously false claims. One could prove that a cigarette was harmless merely by taking the "30-day test". If a woman's throat seemed OK after smoking Camels for 30 days (!), then surely they would do no harm over 30 years.

Logical? Never mind, it raked in the billions. The other thing people believe is that no one smokes any more, that the tobacco companies are limping along and about to  fold. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Smoking is bigger than ever in the third world, where Big Tobacco exploits people's misery by offering them the only "pleasure" they can afford, cheap cigarettes no doubt made from crappy ingredients. 

Filters, recessed filters, charcoal, low-tar-and-nicotene cigarettes, even the screaming fallacy of "It's Toasted" - none of these ploys made a goddamn bit of difference to people's health. It had all been a very carefully calculated sham. Mildness, flavor, taste, "I smoke them because I like them", and my all-time favorite: "If you want a treat instead of a treatment" - none of these seductive little promises meant one less coffin sold. 

'50s Treasures (and dubious pleasures)

Pream or scream?

I love Pream ads more than life itself, because they're so odd. (For those who are less than 100 years old, Pream was the first powdered coffee creamer, and it was made of milk solids, which is why it ultimately failed. The damn stuff just didn't dissolve in coffee and turned to sludge at the bottom.)

Oddest of the odd is this lady with her weird facial expressions, which lent themselves to manipulation through screenshots. I was surprised to see how easily I could completely change the look on her face, from puzzlement to near-paranoia. 

She obviously has her doubts about that Pream.

Snap, crackle, oh damn.

I don't remember seeing this particular Rice Krispies ad as a kid, mainly because it was a few years before my time. Yes! There are actually things that happened before I existed on this earth, and this ad was one of them. 

What's strange about it is that they tell you to send away for something that costs FIFTEEN CENTS, meaning it's particularly expensive in the cereal box world. This was the era of "free inside!", after all, or toys you got just for sending in box tops. I remember laboriously cutting or tearing off box tops and mailing them to Battle Creek, Michigan, for my "free" toy, which usually never came.

But this is really strange. Not only do you have to pay fifteen cents for these things, the "dolls" you get aren't even assembled! You have to cut them out, sew around the outside, then stuff them with cotton, presumably not provided. Which means that you're basically getting a printed piece of cloth.

I don't know how many of these pathetic dolls survive today, but I did find some replicas (which I made into a gif, above) that are quite impressive - probably a lot more impressive than the dolls. We've dealt with the cloth Harold Lloyd dolls that you could get free (with purchase) at the Piggly Wiggly, but those were at least sewn together and looked fairly substantial. 

These would look like nine kinds of hell even if you were a good seamstress, and how many eight-year-olds can say that? I can tell that Mom must have ended up doing a lot of these on her sewing machine, turning them inside-out to sew the seam, then finding some "cotton batten" (batting) or kapok, which was what we used back then to stuff anything.

But hey nonny! I cannot believe what I just found - there IS a surviving Rice Krispies doll, on an old page about cloth dolls that came from cereal boxes and such. It's nearly as hideous as I would have imagined. 

But this one, oh damn.

    
                             OH damn.      

"Put a smile in your smoking!": 1950s TV advertising

 

There really was a Chef Boyardee

This has got to be one of my dumbest animations ever, but here it is anyway.  For God's sake, I could only find three pictures! Then they had to be worked on a lot to get them to match up. Pretend he is smacking his lips, or blowing on something to cool it off.

Like everyone else, I was surprised to discover there really was a Chef Boyardee, a renowned chef who owned popular Italian restaurants. This went on very nicely until World War II, when the nation desperately needed army rations. Voila - canned spaghetti! This had never been tried before, and it is said that soldiers went about with can openers slung around their necks to partake of cold, congealed ravioli and other gourmet delights.

This brought about a change in the product, of course, making it blander and more uniform. It was sturdy food that could provide quick calories and hold up in the trenches. But in the 1950s, when the good chef first appeared on TV, army-ration-style food was still very much "in". All those horrific Spam/gelatined table scraps/creamed everything recipes prove it. America still very much remembered the war as they entered that other war, the cold one.

And the cold rations went over well. I fed my kids Chef Boyardee ravioli (which my toddler son called "dabioti") because they ate it, and liked it, and it was easy. I guess they survived. I even ate it myself, but the last time I tried it, it tasted like nothing. I was shocked.

I find it interesting that, while he and the announcer both correctly pronounce his name "Boi-AR-di", it soon evolved into the supposedly-more-manageable "Boy-ar-DEE". I will never forget those pizza mixes, which for years and years was the only pizza we ever consumed: thin cardboard crust, non-zippy red sauce, and a little can of powder that passed for cheese.

See, hear, smell, taste: feel?

Stopette! Stopette RIGHT NOW!

I could, can, and do watch old commercials by the hour. Some of them I actually remember - in fact, the 1950s ones are probably among my first memories of being alive on this earth. From the very start, I was a vid kid.

There was an obsession then with giving products intimidating-sounding names that gave you a sense of control, or, at least, stopping something. Thus, the early deodorant product Stopette (a name which somehow wouldn't fly today), a shampoo with the bizarre name Subdue, Enden ("dandruff problems are ended by Enden, ended by Enden"), and, of course, Tame.

I don't know if any of these products are still around today. I looked for more with similar control-obsessed names, but they all had to do with hair, and I was sick of the image of hair being stiffly shaken to show how "natural-looking" it is (even in the later, '60s Tame ad with its Marlo Thomas 'do).

Note the forbidding-looking X on the Enden jar. This stuff means business. It doesn't just treat, it annihilates. That woman could kill you with one swing of the head.

Having become sick of hair and its regimentation, I branched out into other products.  There was Allerest, of course, with its aggressive police-force vibe; and Compoz, some sort of bromide-based tranquillizer along the lines of Miles Nervine. It brought to mind the classic "Mother, please!" Anacin commercial, with its famous line, "Control yourself! Sure, you have a headache". I FINALLY found a video of this ad after more than a decade of frustration. This is the best version I could come up with.

Not the best, with its black borders, but sometimes that's all you have to work with. Even my own mother, who was in many ways the archetypal '50s housewife, thought this ad was absurd, even parodying it as she stirred the tapioca pudding.

But I don't suppose anyone realized just how disturbing this Anacin commercial is, with the woman's mental health fraying into a thread due to the shenanigans of her naughty kids, This causes her to automatically reach for the "solution": a chill pill. The ominous throbbing zoom-in, the red screen and fraying rope seem to indicate she's near the snapping point, whatever that means (butcher knife, anyone?) Reaching for a pill instead of dealing with domestic problems was something encouraged by doctors, who often prescribed a lot stronger stuff than Anacin.

But this is the really creepy part. The threads resolve themselves back into the kind of rope that would be sturdy enough to hang yourself with. I wonder if the advertisers even thought of that. At the very least, a rope is something you use to tie things up/down (such as yourself - or maybe the kids?). The bland unfocussed look on the woman's face indicates that she has likely washed down her Anacin pill with several martinis.

POST-NOTE. The first two gifs have two women in them, or one woman duplicated side-by-side, for reasons I still can't figure out. In fact, this post was originally going to feature ads with duplicate women, but I couldn't find any more. The Doublemint Twins just wouldn't do.