G.E. Refrigerator - The center of family life.

Gather round, children, and I'll spin a yarn of adventure from the Days of Yore. See, once upon a time, instead of a "refrigerator" everyone had an "ice box" in their kitchen. This was because before anyone figured out how to make stuff cold by compressing certain gasses, the only way to do it was by keeping huge blocks of ice around the house, and hopefully replacing them with new huge blocks of ice as they melted. Today's ad is from G.E., promoting their exciting 1941 line of electric refrigerators.

Consumer refrigerators had been available since 1930something, but it seems they were still new enough to justify the term "electric refrigerator". Want a modern analogy? "Digital camera". Only a few years ago, you would have told your friends you were thinking of getting a "digital camera", but now you just call it a camera. I bet it really frosts the old timers who now have to listen to everyone say "film camera" to describe the old obsolete technology.

Here's a Three Stooges short on FaceTube in which they play ice men, making a delivery to a house on a very tall hill on a very hot day. This short didn't make sense to me when I was a kid, until my mom explained to me that people used to need giant blocks of ice for daily life. What's funny to me now is that the horse reads the sign to determine they're at the right address, and wakes up the Stooges to get to work. Interestingly, this short was released in 1941, the same year as this ad. I guess there were still enough ice boxes around that the story of the film still worked... or at least worked well enough for a Stooges short.

Anyway, this ad takes up back to the time when the fridge was the center of family life. When you came home on a hot day, you'd open the fridge and let it cool the house, and everyone would hang out in the kitchen, gradually eating all the food you own because it's 1941 and there's nothing else to do but have wars.

Here we see a hand-ful of teen-agers having a bull-session in front of the elec-tric refrigerator. Mary holds a cafeteria tray full of pudding while everyone finishes all the milk and brown squares (or as we used to call them, "squarebrowns").

Blayne loves the way Mary's Mom makes squarebrowns, but he's just plowing through them, eager to try the pudding that Mary is holding in front of those curious lumps in her sweater. Is there pudding in there, too? Yes and no, Blayne!

Redshirt Rob (as his friends call him) just eats whatever is put in his mouth. He's just staring at Mary's legs, wondering what holds them together at the top. Easy there, Rob! There's plenty of time to find out after you're drafted and shot down over France! He'll also find out that the French have a funny word for gonorrhea. They just call it "le sexe".

Hey! What's Judith up to? Is she stealing something from the bread-box? No, she's tuning the radio. Keeping an analog radio on one station  was like balancing a plate on a pencil - constant attention. It was worth it, because in 1941, radio was still relevant and listenable. Radio networks wouldn't be programmed for twelve-year-olds by hyperactive ferrets for another fifty years, so Judith better keep her knob-hand limber! I'll help her steal some of the boys' attention back from Mary. And if the radio doesn't do it, there's always the G.E.'s Butter Conditioner that keeps table butter just right for spreading.

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Plastic Wood - Let us repair.

I don't know how much time or attention was devoted to the artwork in this ad for Plastic Wood, but it kind of looks like clip art, or some other "disposable medium". Quite often, the stuff that gets the least scrutiny is the most enjoyable.

Did they even have clip art collections in 1958? More likely, these little cartoons were cranked out rapidly for not much money. Plastic Wood doesn't seem like a high-profile advertiser with a big reputation to worry about, so maybe they were done as offhandedly as they look. They don't embody any particular style of the era. They're just cartoons. But they become funny once you wipe out the words. Yes, some things get funnier WITHOUT captions! Crazy. I know. Inform the press.

While coming home from a hard day at the Office for Nuclear Mutants, Lucinda ripped the door off her lair. Despite her enormous exposed brain, she somehow found a way to not know her own strength.What a cruel twist of mutant fate.

She cries not so much for the damaged roof of her doll's A-frame alpine chalet, but because her other dolls will have to find somewhere else to stay this ski season. Her brother's dishwasher box fort is a likely place, despite its inconvenient location relative to the slopes and apres-ski cafes. Oh, the humanity.

There's a reason Henry the 8th's chair was so surprisingly cheap at the antique store. Originally rated for 800 lbs or 1.2 kings, Tudor era ham-based construction glues degraded over time and by 1958 could barely support the weight of one standard Aunt. The pages of eBay Europe are filled with offers of "One antique chair. Questionable leg. Could possibly be repaired by handyman with pork."

This same piece of art was used by a different manufacturer to market "Cookie Knobs". Oddly, that company had learned nothing from their previous bout of lawsuits following the "Lunch-a-Blades" fiasco, and the firm folded under economic stress of the many settlements. Their advertising assets were eventually sold off to recover some losses, and this piece of art went on to much better use at the Plastic Wood company.

Concept Cars 1956 - Gimme some bubble dome.

The June 1956 issue of Mechanix Illustrated (no relation to Spellin' Illustrated) featured a report on the new cars for '57. As ever, there were concept cars aplenty, brimming with cool ideas and promises nobody intended to keep. Thanks, Detroit! Reproduced here for your entertainment is the full article, even the trailing pages that have no pictures and make you flip randomly around the magazine to finish reading:: "Continued on the spine of the magazine." I frikkin hate that.

Giant versions of all pages are at the bottom of the post.

A "trend to SMALLER wheels?!?" I know all those words, but they don't make sense to me when placed all next to each other in that order.

Notice the hyphenated whitewalls, which save weight. Also, the tail fins keep the car moving in a straight line, eliminating "cornering" and other undesirable "European" handling traits.

New for '57, spewing soot all over the side of your car! Also notice the clever folding hardtop, which doesn't so much "fold" as it just slides into a nine-foot section of the car completely given over to roof storage. For added convenience, when not storing your car's roof, the trunk can be used to store other things, like perhaps a different car's roof.

Iiiiiii'm the man in the box.

Joke #1 - International Correspondence Schools' least-responded ad: "Singing in Various Shapes, Lesson One - Cubes."

Joke #2 - A much earlier, and much less famous "Steely Dan" recording session.

Joke #3 - For the "differently talented" vocalist: the soundproof recording booth... also recording proof, and dignity proof.

Joke #4 - The ugly underbelly of the recording industry, where all too many eager young talents get their first paying "gig".

Joke #5 - From the banned first season of Hollywood Squares: Paul Lynd and his "musical personal massager"... an answer to a question no one asked.

Joke #6 - Behind the scenes in Consumer Reports' suit-testing chamber, measuring for a critical feature in Fifties America: squareness absorption.

Joke #7 - Jim J. Bullock's much-ignored album "Listening to my Pants".

Joke #8 - An early failure to create a tesseract in controlled conditions: the "square within a square", whose points can be described by the formula {(x,y,z,h): 0  x  1, 0  y  1, 0  z  1, 0  h  DORK}.

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post. -Mgmt.]

Chrysler Air Conditioning 1954 - Feels like a fridge. Looks like a fridge.

Recently, Jalopnik's informal daily reader survey, the "Question Of The Day" asked "What car colors need to make a comeback?" My response didn't make it into the top ten responses, but I am now surprised that turquoise didn't make it in either. I mean, paired with the white accents in this '54 Chrysler, it looks damn good. The effect is more impressive with all the shiny metal surfaces on the interior of the car.
See? Pretty. Could I live with it every day? Probably not, but just because I wouldn't buy a car this color doesn't mean I couldn't appreciate there being cars like this around. Car colors are stuck in a rut. Silver, champagne, black, white, with an occasional daring splash of dark blue or burgundy. There are exceptions to this chromatic vehicular dirge, but overall, the scenery on my daily commute is far too monotonous. I'm not helping, either. My car? Silver. Yawn. It was the one on the lot with the features I wanted, though.

Apart from the color of this Chrysler, the predominance of body-color surfaces inside the car is notable, as is the preponderance of hard metal surfaces, each of which are all too eager to bash your brains out. This was 1954, when building a safe car meant making a nice rigid box for you to bounce around in when you hit something good and solid. That steering column is a gorgeous piece of industrial design that will look just as pretty rammed through your chest. Fortunately, this will never happen, because the steering wheel will prevent it from sinking in too far, like the "basket" on the end of a ski pole. The woman in the ad will  have to settle for admiring the beauty of the steering column with her head stuck through the wheel. Let's not talk about her daughter.

How safe was this car? The ad doesn't tell us which of their cars was used for the picture, and I'm not enough of a vintage car buff to tell just by looking at the interior (although I think there may be some in the peanut gallery that can). In general, a modern car weighs roughly the same now as an equivalent model did way back in '54, thanks to heavy stuff like electronics and safety equipment. However, they're structured VERY differently. Your average Car of the Future is designed to crumple itself into a ball to dissipate a crash's energy, sacrificing itself to save your life. They didn't understand much about safety features in 1954.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) rates vehicular fatalities on a number of scales, but a key number to look at is the number of deaths per hundred million miles traveled in cars by the population. This is the "fatalities per VMT" (Vehicular Miles Traveled). This is clever, because it controls for the greater number of cars on the road these days, which would otherwise make it hard to compare numbers.

So, how many people died per hundred million miles driven in 1954? Six.
How many deaths per VMT in 2009? One and a half.

Also, current cars have more "soft touch" surfaces inside, like rubberized plastic, foam, and fabric. This makes the interior more quiet and less echoey. A conversation in the '54 Chrysler would have been like talking in an oil barrel. However, one thing all those shiny metal surfaces have going for them is that it's really easy to clean them. Viscera wipes right off.

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Panasonic RE8080 - Mechless car audio, 1972 style.

I hate my car's head unit (radio). There's a USB plug in the armrest, so you can listen to MP3s stored on a flash drive. Fantastic. However, the radio's software randomly chooses to be unable to read the flash drive. Repeated attempts are generally fruitless until I power cycle the radio (turn the power off and on) by turning the whole car on and off. Then, chances are better it will read the MP3s. Having these arguments with my car's stereo is not handy while driving. How spoiled am I? Look what was new and exciting back in 1972.

We've reported on Panasonic's clunky, modular audio systems before. But this ad's in color! Presumably with the intent of saving you the expense of buying a tape transport mechanism for your car AND house, Panasonic hit upon the complicated idea of pulling your 8-track player out of your home stereo and shoving it into your car's dash. The amazing convenience being that you can continue listening to the tape from where you left off.

As with the other Panasonic stereo linked above in our older post, there was a separate adapter to carry around in case you wanted to listen to a cassette. Then there were the many cassettes to lug around. Good times.

In the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, car stereos were big ticket items, likely to be stolen if you left your car without an armed guard for a few minutes. Those days are kind of gone now. For one thing, factory radios have gotten better. Most people don't really have a great need to replace their car's original stereo. Good thing, too, because stereos are routinely combined with heating and ventilation controls, and buried behind stylized dashboard panels. Replacing a radio is not as simple as it once was. All of this makes radio theft not only harder, but also less worthwhile.

This will look great in my spaceship.

Even if you do choose to replace your car's head unit, you're likely to wind up with an overstyled thing that matches the rest of your car's interior about as well as a tennis shoe stuffed into the dash. Electronics manufacturers seem bent on capturing the snapperhead "fast & furious" segment of the market, to the exclusion of all those who want something that blends in with the rest of the instrumentation. There doesn't seem to be any company losing sleep over the problem of "stealthy" aftermarket car stereos. If they were really thinking, manufacturers would offer each model in your choice of face color and backlight color. Some stereos do allow you to adjust the backlighting color in infinite variety. However, there aren't many silver stereos, and that's a very common color found in cars. I don't know anybody with a shiny black dash board.

If I do replace my stereo, it'll probably be one of the "mechless" designs. These are basically a radio with no moving parts inside. It's an amplifier and tuner, into which you plug your various portable devices for content. This Panasonic stereo from 1972 is sort of mechless... when you pull the mechanism out to take it in the house to finish listening to The Captain & Tenille.

So, even with my intermittent USB problem, my car's iPod connector works just fine. I rarely use it, partly because my commute is often filled with podcasts played from a non-Apple device, but also because I don't like the hassle of fumbling around with the iPod cable in my arm rest. And yet, the fun of connecting and reconnecting stereo components is exactly what Panasonic is showcasing in this ad. I have something a million times better than this Panasonic stereo but I can't be bothered to plug in a cable. What a jerk.

My old car had an aftermarket stereo with Bluetooth streaming, so I could listen to music or podcasts magically sent through thin air from my phone to the car's head unit. I miss that. In a few years I'll probably look back on Bluetooth streaming as barbaric, because of the drudgery of pairing the phone with the stereo. "Ow, my pairing finger is all worn out!" I'll moan. What a baby. I already hate my spoiled, lazy future self.

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Good Morning, Electron Microscope!

Joke #1 - Mr. Curious electron microscope, for loads of rainy-day fun. $224,000.00. Available at Montgomery Ward, Kresge, and Kroger stores. Electrons sold separately.

Joke #2 - "Hm! Looks like your pregnant, Richard."

Joke #3 - "Well, if you haven't prepared the sample yet, then whose sperm ARE these?!?!?"

Joke #4 - "Let's see. The latest culture specimens are determined to be....'icky'. Really, professor. Was it worth saving six thousand dollars to go with the Fisher-Price microscope?"

Joke #45 was written by John Grizmond Thanks, John! - Dr. Rivers’ thrust her delicate cheek against his scan-hole, and Dial-Eyes blushed like a schoolboy. If only they could be alone!

Jokes 6 through 9 are on permanent loan from the satirical wing of the Jeremy Hornik Extra Classy Gallery of Humour. Thanks, Jeremy!-  

 

Joke #6 - Skynet’s first Terminator prototype barely hinted at the technical complexity to come.

Joke #7 - “Doctor, every time I use your new espresso-making invention, I could swear that I hear… sighing?”

Joke #8 - “OH… … … I… WAS… JUST… THINKING… YOU… AND… I… COULD… GO… GET… MALTEDS… … … SILLY… I… SUPPOSE…”

Joke #9 - “I know you know where ze rebels are, robot. You look guilty as fuck! Hit him again, Hans!”

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.    -Mgmt.]