Crazy Camay Soap Lady

 

The lady in this Camay soap commercial seems a little too ecstatic, somehow. . . 

The little angels of Camay

They Came from Hell: the strangest dolls in advertising

I apologize for this, but I had to load it up-front to get you used to the flavor of this post. My obsession with old comic book ads knows no bounds, and on my recent trawl I found some pretty good ones - push-up bras made of baling wire, memberships to secret mystical societies, ads for starting your own frog ranch, circuses for a dollar starring a performing "actual live" chameleon, etc., along with classics like Grog Grows Own Tail and the chihuahua in a teacup plaintively asking, "Will you give me a home?"

But I ruthlessly cut these out of the mix when I saw the number of creepy doll ads. Like clowns, there is something inherently squickish about the doll as an object, human yet not human, and often grotesque even in its supposed cuteness. "Lifelike" is the word that comes up again and again to describe a lifeless object.

I won't get into "reborn" dolls either, often made of rubbery silicone so that their arms and legs jiggle and quiver. Some of these actually have heaters in them, heartbeats, and miniature sound systems to emit baby noises (though Edison obviously got there first). No one wants to think about the next innovation.

I've written about these incredible '60s artifacts before, but there's an update which shocked me. I used to wonder about this ad, how they could ever get away with it, and what "Lilliputian cuteness" meant (I wasn't into Swift at age eight). I tried to picture a hundred rubber dollies a few inches high, but after a while the whole thing was shoved away in a back room of memory.


Then, the wonder of the internet led to this revelation:

Someone had actually ordered these, all those years ago, and kept them in their original box. These reminded me of those little plastic ornamentations you find in cocktails, only thinner, more toothpicky. And yes, it looks as if there's quite an array of them, but the thing is, calling them "dolls" is a real stretch. Apparently in one incarnation, they came with paper clothing, but it's hard for me to imagine how that would work.

And then I found this. . . 

This is obviously the same product, but all of a sudden they're five bucks! The type is too small to read, but presumably they had dropped the Lilliputian bit. I have no idea what year this version came out. But it's ripoff times five.

There's a whole category of moving dolls, the type that emit the most godawful grinding-gears sound as they inch along. 

Some of these look like cheats. I think you have to stand behind this one and "walk" it, so it's incapable of independent movement. And any doll that costs 50 cents - I don't know. Maybe, like the 100 dolls for a dollar, she's really only an inch high, a prototype version of nanotechnology.

Botteltot just has such a strange name. You'd think the manufacturer could come up with something better, more descriptive, such as Cindy Pees-a-lot. And I just don't get Toodles. Nobody costs 44 cents, with a 19-cent "layette". Maybe, like the Walking Doll with the checkered skirt, she came with boxtops from Joy Liquid - or whatever. 

We don't have to know what the text means, which is good, because I don't. The sad purse-mouthed expression on Grasitas's face kind of says it all. And that sure is a strange diaper.

Noma the Electronic Doll is manufactured by Effanbee, which somehow makes me uncomfortable. Noma was the brand of our old Christmas lights, the ones that used to electrocute you or give you third-degree burns. Though the ad gives the impression that Noma walks, she doesn't. But she prays, which is maybe a good thing for everyone.

Does this doll resemble Regan from The Exorcist, or Carrie, or - Good God! Feel my ribs? Hear my voices? Somebody call Stephen King.

Here is a ventriloquist's dummy - always a staple of the Twilight Zone series of the '60s - who not only talks (in your own voice, of course) but SMOKES. And he's under three bucks,so what can we lose, except maybe sleep?

And here is Sandy, endowed with Rubber Wonderskin and hair you can "wave", along with the usual accoutrements (bottles with rubber nipples, etc. - though with hair like that, she can't be the right age for diapers). Someone must have believed this advertisment would attract Mommies enough to want to shell out four dollars (C. O. D.!) to scare their daughters half to death.

The Edison Talking Doll was a flop. It stopped talking after little girls had cranked it a few times, and once the public saw its inner workings, they were too creeped out to want it. The whole concept was flawed from the beginning, but I don't think it mattered to Edison. It was just another way of getting attention for his REAL phonograph, which he stole from a guy in Germany. The Berliner Talking Doll just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

The continuing saga of the Mungsingwear Men!

You truly can't make this stuff up. At a time when homosexuality was persecuted and kept hidden, a major underwear company ran ads like this. There are too many to count, and I keep finding new ones, so I can't put them all in one post (but there are lots more on this one):

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-stretchy-seat-paradox.html

All are heavily suggestive, from the dominant/submissive body postures to the titillating captions. In this one, the men are actually touching each other.

How did this ever get through? Was it a case of "oh, surely not"? Was it the same syndrome that allowed comedy teams like Martin and Lewis/Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby to "pass", with no one even thinking there might be more going on?

Just try that now.

Does that mean things are MORE repressive now? In a way, yes. If you ran this ad today, it would provoke howls of laughter. The homosexual connection would be obvious.

Every time I see one of these, my jaw drops. There should be a Munsingwear Hall of Fame. Behind all that joshing around is a passion for men's briefs so sizzling it fairly jumps off the page.

The "stretchy-seat" paradox

There's this weird, oh, I don't know, thing. This paradox. We generally assume, most of us, that being gay in the 1950s was horribly stigmatized, even persecuted, something you had to scrupulously hide in case you were "found out".

You had to be "manly", meaning devoid of any sort of attraction to your own sex. The pressure was enormous. You had to line yourself up with movie stars like Rock Hudson (oops) and Raymond Burr (double-oops), who were then believed to be rampantly heterosexual.

SO WHAT'S THIS SHIT ALL ABOUT?

These are men's underwear ads, presumably from the 1950s, in which men are in such blatantly homoerotic positions that it just makes you wonder. Is this just  "oh, surely not", or a "hey, they're just joshing around" kind of thing?

But think about it. Back then we had male comedy teams like Martin and Lewis, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. (Crosby and Danny Kaye, later "outed" as gay, even appeared in drag in White Christmas.) We had singing duos who came on Ed Sullivan - what the hell was the name of that duo? I'll have to look it up AGAIN, even though I've looked it up 27 times before. (Sandler and Young.)

But none of them appeared in these kinds of poses, like the one below, with the guy on the left just waiting to be serviced by the other guy, who seems to be getting down on his knees. This ad must have been designed by somebody like Sal Romano from Mad Men, who had to sublimate his illicit passions into his artwork.

Maybe people were gay-blind then. Or they are now, when looking back. Surely it meant something else to bandy about terms like "stretchy-seat"? We just assume everybody was clean-cut and devoid of any non-Doris-Day-humping impulses back then. In fact, if these ads are any indication, it looks like there was lots of very public boy-on-boy action going on, and it was considered completely OK. Stuff that today would make people squirm.

Like this.

These are ads for a sort of one-piece spandex jumpsuit/panty-girdle for men, with legs in it. Presumably there was a fly in them somewhere (there's some mention of a horizontal fly, a bizarre concept if ever there was one, reminding me for some reason of a sideways vagina), or maybe you just wriggled them down like women did. They had a patented "stretchy-seat" in them (no kidding!) that presumably gave a little testicular support during spontaneous wrestling matches on the living room floor. This was strong enough to contain the most explosive fart, and could not (presumably) be penetrated from the outside. I don't know if the one-piece "union suit" design ever caught on - it's hard to believe that a man would render himself that inaccessible, unless dry humping was the preferred method.

(Transcript of dialogue)

"Old Flappy-Pants-Pappy Himself!"

Pete: Can the comedy, will you? These suit me, and I like 'em. . . get it? They're Munsingwear "BREEX". They're bias-cut, with as much room and comfort behind as anybody needs. . . and what about that stingy little number you got on?

Mac: Stingy, my eye! You mean streamlined, modern. . . what a getting-around guy needs. Munsingwear, too. . . these SKIT-Shorts, with the new, easy "Stretchy-Seat" that stretches up and down.

(Transcript of dialogue)

Fred:  Gladiator! Stick to your putting! Nothing could be more comfortable than these SKIT-Trunks! They're brief enough. . . without making you look as if you'd joined a nudist colony!

Pete: Oh, yeah? Well. . . next to my skin I like air. Look at the leg-room here! And these give mild support, too!

It's strange, because I can't imagine the gayest man in the world (Elton John?) discussing "leg-room" and "mild support" (not to mention "stretchy-seat") with ANYONE, even the cutest pool-boy in the world. It's just so. . . not even gay - it's something else - just. . . disturbing.

Yet it's obvious it isn't meant to be gay. I mean, they wouldn't. I mean. . . would they?

I swear, this guy's butt looks like something out of an old Playtex girdle ad from the 1960s. Unless he has a thigh problem, and men don't usually have cellulite, I just don't get the shorts-like design of these. In fact I don't see how ANYONE could wear one of these, except maybe Ed Wood in his Glen or Glenda phase. He might get in a car accident, after all, and the doctor pronouncing him dead would see it.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm