Seiberling Tires - Just in the squish of time.

June, 1952. Seiberling tires launches a new ad in Life magazine, singing the praises of the engineering they put into their tires. Engineering that gives you "an extra margin of safety". Then they add a picture of a man clearly being crushed between two cars.

They seem pretty proud of the fact that they got George Hughes to paint their weird little picture. He was active mostly in the fifties, doing a lot of work for The Saturday Evening Post. If you ask me, he kind of paints like a big fan of Norman Rockwell, but maybe that's because the Post asked for it. Rockwell was the darling of the Saturday Evening Post, and one couldn't go too far wrong by imitating his style.

Yeah yeah, big deal. The real news is that the man that looks like Jim Carrey has obviously had his legs crushed into a fine paste by those two Oldsmobuicks. The gist of the picture is obviously supposed to be that he was barely spared a hideous injury / gooey demise by the marvelous Seiberling tires, but that's not how it looks to me. He's been mashed. The reactions of the bystansders all indicate that it was merely a close call, but I think that it'd be a more convincing statement on the tires' quality if we could see more daylight between the guy's kneecaps and the bumpers. Maybe it's a video game and this is the player's second playthrough, which has allowed him/her to enable the "no clipping code"? Nah. If that were the case, we'd also see "big head mode" activated, too.

The baffling features of this painting don't stop at the pedestrian's manglement. Look at the squatty man. Is he actually trying to lift the black car? Even if he were strong enough to do so, how would that help the Jim Carrey guy? "Here, let me help you pulverize your femurs, as well as your tibias,  fibulas, and patellas. I know those words because I'm a doctor, you know. Pretty cool, huh? Here's my card."


Check out the little girl looking out the back of the black car. Good thing Jim Carrey is uninjured. Witnessing the bloody crippling of a famously annoying actor would be the kind of thing that ruins your wedding day... especially if she was the type of child bride that denies scientific facts.

Wait a second. I think I've got this scene figured out. The Jim Carrey lookalike is not a human. It's not raining. That's not water on the ground. It's hydraulic fluid, because the robot that ran into the middle of a busy street has just had his legs crushed. The second squatty robot is obviously using his mighty robo strength to free the damaged robot, while the young bride in the black car looks on in ironic envy of the robots. Why? Because she is a vaccine denialist who cannot survive outside her protective sterile vehicle. She's wearing a wedding gown because she heard Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy broke up, and she's hoping to get him on the rebound. She thinks the robot is Jim Carrey.

That was easy. Anything else I can clear up this morning?

 P.S.  (High res versions of each page below.)