Sarah and I recently made our way through the first Barnaby Grimes book: Curse Of The Night Wolf. We quite enjoyed it and will probably seek out others, by the way. However, I had to do some deep background explanations on the concept of the various quack medicinal tonics of the time period, as Sarah isn’t really up on her historical snake oil salesmen. I was able to do it, with some helpful reference to Pete’s Dragon, but it took some explaining. When I saw this vintage ad for Melachol, my immediate thought was to show it to her as an illustration of the concept. Fortunately my parenting brain did kick in before I did that, and suggested to me that I might be better off not having to explain “functional impotence”, “irregularities of menstruation”, or “perverted secretions” at this time. (Actually, I’m not sure I could explain that last one.)
Tag: vintage advertising
Saturday Night Shotgun Post
While I’m uploading some MP3s for a music post a little later tonight, let’s do the tab closing dance: Did you see the story about the scientists who unfroze the blob of 120,000 year old life in the Arctic? I can’t do my usual thing of making the news sound like a creepy SF or Lovecraftian story, since the actual… Read more →
Proto-Muppet Protection Racket Advertising
There is an extensive explanation for this wild and bizarre sequence at the Muppet Wiki. Here’s a bit of it: In 1957, Jim Henson was approached by a Washington, D.C. coffee company to produce ads for Wilkins Coffee. The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the commercials had to be lightning-fast — essentially, eight seconds for… Read more →
Even More Things I Did Not Know
Science has brought us a permanent, but easily-removable, tattooing ink. Does this change the metatext of tattooing? I mean, the pain is still there, but if the permanence isn’t part of the subtext anymore, what does that mean for the story? Is it to obvious to predict the rise of a serial-tattooing culture, or a rift between the permanents and… Read more →
