Dormeyer Coffe Pot - Bean's chosen demise.

Advertising tends to stop working on you the more you think. Worse than thinking is asking questions. Questions are the kryptonite of the ad man. Do not ask questions. Just consume. This 1960 ad for Dormeyer small appliances is a harmless but classic example of the baffling proposals that ad men would like us to accept.

The mascot is a coffee bean, drinking a cup of coffee while explaining to us his dream of being roasted, crushed, boiled, drained, and drunk by humans. If the observer can accept the idea of an anthropomorphic bean, he or she should feel a certain sense of horror that this bean has such masochistic fantasies, not to mention cannibalistic habits. A creature this weird deserves a painful death in a lovely Silver-Smith aluminum chamber of doom.

Silver-Smith aluminum? Wait, what? I hope they're only using the word "silver" to describe the color of the metal. Otherwise, we have no choice but to conclude that Dormeyer's advertising company has nothing but contempt for the meaning of words.

Anyway, back to the dream of Bean Guy. In a past life, I worked at a place that animated some commercials. One of the spots we worked on was for Starkist Tuna. You know - the ones with Charlie the Tuna in them? Even as I drew stacks of drawings of Charlie, I couldn't help but be confused as to why his dream was to be killed, ground into pulp and eaten by humans. If he were to explain this to me, my reaction to Charlie would start with pity, but would turn to revulsion and, ultimately, the desire to help him achieve his goal, just to make him go away and stop creeping me out. It's easy to hate Charlie the Tuna. Ostensibly, it was a badge of honor to be selected by Starkist for such a fate. I refuse to believe that the fishes in the cans are enthusiastic about being there.

The design of the bean man is kind of horrible Too. the cleft in a coffee bean looks a lot like a butt... or something even more vulgar. Let the images come to you in time. You'll regret it. It looks like the guy started as a fabricated puppet of some kind. Look at his hand. It's a little fabric glove with wires inside to hold the pose. Strange. The red spot color makes it hard to tell what's what, but it looks like the hat, cup, face, and sash are all comped in later by an artist. That's an awful lot of work to breathe life into a misguided abomination like this Bean Guy.

Why not make the mascot a coffee pot, or a long-haul trucker, or a medical student studying for finals? These make more sense than a bean getting a pick-me-up by drinking himself. I think I know why. It's the ad man's fundamental contempt for all living things, real or imagined.