RCA Silverama - There is a presence in this house.

Today Phil Are GO! is proud to bring you part two of our troubling pair of clowny ads from 1957. Yesterday, Wanky the clown forcibly made himself a part of a warm moment between two middle-aged teenagers. Today, one of his plus-sized associates is putting some moves on children. Shocking. Fortunately, the kids can smell the weirdness.

You could have composed a picture to more convincingly portray the kids as being delighted with their rejuvenated hovering invisible television. But instead, these kids look positively nervous. The girl is all but hiding behind her big brother, who is mentally playing possum. A winning strategy.

And why shouldn't they be a little freaked out? The family TV has been repaired, sort of. Clearly, mom and dad (Wait. This is the fifties. Dad paid for it.) sprung for one of those expensive, clear, hover-TVs. And when the picture tube ate itself in six months, as  was the expected service life of mid-century CRTs, they cheaped out and replaced it with an ordinary non-invisible RCA part. Now they have an invisible TV with a completely visible picture tube, as goofy looking as Wonder Woman in her Plexiglass jet. Just like every other half-baked idea conceived in the fully-baked decade of The Seventies, Wonder Woman did not think through her stealth technology very thoroughly. Evil-doers would have detected a woman flying through the air at 15,000 feet, in a sitting position, with the radar signature of a Lear jet. Well done, Di. Completely not suspicious at all.

Poltergeist was very successful creepy-as-hell thriller, despite a premise that would get you laughed at if you described it to someone who had never heard of it. "A little girl is kidnapped into a parallel plane by ghosts living in their TV." Somehow, the movie worked. Replace the ghosts with clowns and you've got yourself in instant NC-17 rating. Actually, come to think of it, the evil spirits in Poltergeist do use a clown doll to do some of their dirty work, creating a diversion in Robbie's room while they make off with Carol Anne. In this 1957 ad, the evil spirits are at it again, in the past.



Clowns stop being scary just as soon as they begin TRYING to be scary. When the clown doll pops up behind Robbie with it's evil face on, it becomes goofy. The only scary clown is a happy one. Some fucktards are super into evil clowns. These jerkoffs are asshats. I've known a couple of these gobshites and they've generally been guys who think they're both tough and funny at the same time, all while being neither thing at any time.

Clowns are annoying because they try too hard. The high-energy shouting only terrifies kids. Clowns are creepy because they look like they're hiding something, or overcompensating for something. Clowns are unjustifiably happy about nothing and basically make it their job to force their irrational jubilance on you. This is impossible. However, the sad kind of clowns are less unbearable. I like to think of them as former "happy" clowns who lost it all at the track and now suffer from cirrhosis of the liver. That makes me smile.

Former happy clown John Gacy.

Anyway, the clown in the transparent TV looks like he's hiding something. The kids aren't fooled and neither am I. He might as well be John Gacy. Good thing the TV's type of invisibility works differently than Wonder Woman's jet. Thankfully, we can't see what the TV clown's hands are doing.

BONUS CONTENT! Nitpicking art note: The perspective is wrong on the picture tube. The electron gun that sits in the tubular projection should protrude from the center of the back of the picture tube. From this angle, it should be completely obscured. However, for their customers to grasp the fact that they're selling picture tubes, RCA thought people have to see the skinny part poking out the back, so they had a guy fake it in. If we could see this picture tube from above, you'd see that the electron gun in sticking out of the corner of the picture tube at a 45 degree angle, or something close to it.