Little Ads - We know Fit from Phonola.

Two non-newsworthy ads today, from the back pages of the Saturday Evening Post! Funny pictures and funny words, it pays to know fit from Phonola.

Ad number first is from Bear Hosiery featuring this really great bear. He's painted with a brush effect with a stupid name: "stipple".


Stippling is a sort of broad term for shading with dots. You can get more specific and talk about pointillism and what have you, but in general, stippling is the technique in which you create the illusion of smooth shading with non-smooth texture. In the case of this bear, the artist worked the bristles of the brush so that they were kind of spread out in little bunches. Then, the tips of the bristles were then dipped in paint and poked onto the paper / canvas / baby's head / parchment / pavement repeatedly to create the texture of the bear. It's a good way of making whimsical art more whimsical and it found a home on lots of cereal box mascots in the fifties and sixties.


Sadly, cereal box art has gone in the direction of imitating the over-rendered plasticy-smooth look of animated CGI kids' movies. Lame.


Anyway, the bear's dot eyes, fat head and skinny nose are also pretty funny. Also, Bear seemed pretty proud of the way their socks fit. You'd think it would be stupid to put a bear in an ad bragging about the way your socks fit on human feet, but bears are one of the few mammals that walk on the pads of their feet, like humans. If you look at the bones in the foot, most mammals walk on their tiptoes. Not bears. They walk kind of like us. I am not making this up. Look it up. NOW who doesn't know how to advertise socks?


Also, bears won't run away just because you open your jacket and pretend to be bigger than you are, just like humans. That's a myth. Bears aren't fooled by this trick and neither are police officers.

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Ad number B wants us to buy a "phonograph". Music used to be sold on vinyl discs with hardly any copy protection at all called "records". You could play them on any phonograph you wanted and Apple couldn't stop you. Also, every time you played it, it wore out a little more and sounded a little worse and eventually every record became a Yoko Ono album. Good times.


Anyway, Phonola makes up some hilarious B.S. words to make their phonograph seem fancy. Two speakers = "duo fi". An adapter for 45 RPM records = "magic 45 center". I sometimes wonder if bullshit was invented by a bull or an advertising exec.


This recrod player may have sounded pretty good, since the cabinet was probably made from wood. I have one or two radios that are plastic, like most stuff you can buy now, and the sound is a little uninspiring. Yes, it's possible to make a plastic radio that sounds incredible, but its way easier to make a wooden radio that sounds incredible without having multiple advanced degrees in acoustics and wave physics. Long story short - there's a reason cellos and pianos are wooden. Sorry. I mean "pianolas and cell-o-ramas".

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