Please do not adjust your set

 

 

 

 

A horse is a horse? BULL

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.      

Keith Morrison: sex symbol for the Tena Generation

I went on the Dateline Facebook page tonight, and all I seemed to see were ooohs and ahhhhs about Keith. One woman said, "I really don't care what the story is, so long as Keith is doing it." They all seemed to mention his voice. Not that his delivery is melodramatic. . . well. . . you know what they say. So DID he see the murder that night, or was it just 'one of those'. . . Fuck, you know what I mean, the man is as melodramatic as Shatner, and probably older, but women still love him. OLD women.

How Donald Trump Could Get Fired

EXPLOSION! Grain silo collapses on power line

I look like Superman

"We're with the band": a Sergeant Pepper flip book

 

 

MadTV - Wizard of Oz (Alternate Ending)

     Now we know what really happened to that oil can.

When cars were cars

The thumbnail YouTube provided was inadequate, so this one is the wrong colour, but no less extreme. 1959 was the year of Utmost Fins, when they just couldn't get any more aggressive. This '59 Cadillac seemed to go on for blocks.

BAD KITTY! A festival of nasty cat gifs

Bentley and the spider!

                       
              The brave hunter vs. the enormous spider.

A goose gives me the evil eye

Harold Lloyd: the lost tapes

I swear, I never thought I would get to see three seconds of the lost Harold Lloyd film, Professor Beware (1938). It was a movie that was shown maybe once on American TV, and then, for reasons unknown, buried.

Harold plays an Egyptologist who gets into all sorts of wacky situations, and the word is that he didn't like the movie very much and felt the gags were overly silly. Harold had a lot of pull with Howard Hughes in those days, not to mention William Randolph Hearst, the man who buried Citizen Kane, so if he wanted the movie pulled, it would be pulled.

That means that, in spite of a lot of promotional hoop-la, it was probably barely seen.

I have no idea where this snippet of video came from, and it seems to be part of a tribute to Sterling Holloway rather than Harold. It's a minute long, and doesn't tell me very much.

I've heard through the Rich Correll grapevine that Paramount owns Professor Beware now, but keeps it in a vault. Or maybe they destroyed it. I doubt I will ever get to see it, but then, a couple of years ago I came up completely dry, and now I have one minute of it!

The stills are magnificent, however. They are all I have.

(Nobody does dismay better than Harold Lloyd, and I notice in the stills that he's often slapping himself on the forehead, gasping and ducking his head. God, how I'd love to see this!)