Puerto Rican Rums - A who and who?

This 1950 weird ad isn't for a brand. It's from an organization. The Puerto Rican Rum Institute ("Oh! You mean the PRRI!") was generally in favor of Americans buying just, sort of, all rums from Puerto Rico.

"In all the world, the smoothest, most mixable of drinks, according to connoisseurs, is a fine light, dry rum... and in all the world no rums are finer and lighter than the rums of Puerto Rico".

...where "connoisseurs" means "The Puerto Rican Rum Institute staffers", naturally.

It's whatever-holiday-you-want-to-call-it time, (and I like to call it Saturnalia, just for the sake of predating all the other bandwagon holiday posers) and you know that means people are going to be making nog. And immediately afterward, they're going to all be asking each other "What the fuck is nog anyway, and are there other nogs apart from egg?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggnog#History

Anyhoo, there don't seem to be other types of nog. The Simpsons, back when the show was funny and deserved to still be in production, once made a really good joke about this when Marge was shopping for emergency hurricane provisions and the store shelves were nearly empty. All she could find were creamed eels, corn nog, and wadded beef.

https://youtu.be/szfLB-SSjA8

Most of the variously disagreeing explanations for nog have the term coming from the word "noggin" which was a type of wooden mug that the drink - always dairy based - was served in. It's easy to understand how syllables are dropped from words once the speakers have a few drinks in them, and that's where the rum comes in.

You can make a virgin eggnog, but mostly, any spirit added to eggnog seems to be rum. Fair enough. The PRRI to the rescue! National Talk Like a Pirate Day didn't exist back in 1950, so Saturnalia was the seasonal high water mark for rum makers. This ad helpfully recommends several rumcentric recipes for holiday drinks, and here are some nicely-resolutioned crops of the recipes just in case you want to give them a try.

Insert record scratch here. Tom and Jerry are a drink, and not just a hyperviolent / hilarious cat and mouse cartoon team? Internet, you gots some 'splaining to do...

https://whatscookingamerica.net/Beverage/tomjerry.htm

There is debate on the origin of the Tom and Jerry Drink, whether it was invented by a British journalist who named the drink after characters in his popular novel in the 1820’s or if it was invented by an American bartender in 1850 who first published a recipe. The Tom and Jerry drink used to be extremely popular in the United States. For over one hundred years, you could even buy Tom and Jerry drink sets. A resurgence of the drink’s popularity came about in the 1940’s after the World War II. This is most likely due to more families entertaining at home instead of the bars.

Oh. That'll do nicely, Internet. Ho-lee shit. Tom and Jerry were a drink WAY before they beat the hell out of each other to the delight of a young Phil Largo..

Anyway, if your Saturnalia seems like it would be made a little easier by drinking a rum-and-pancake combination, or if you have the need to drown your no-more-legal-cockfighting sorrows, we're got you covered. You're welcome!

DuBouchett. So inscrutable.

More holiday times interestingness today from your friends in 1950! Holiday times means entertaining friends and family at your house, and if you ask DuBouchett, that means cordials! And, if you ask anyone (because you're less than sixty years old), "cordials" usually* means "alcohol plus sugar plus fruit. And, alcohol plus sugar means "instant hangover"! Holiday times, mon frer!



*Clearly, by looking at the ad, DuBouchett understands cordials to mean "pre-mixed" cocktails, but cordials are another word for "liqueur".

Okay, so what, technically, is a "liqueur"?

See? Instant hangover! Never question Professor Google! If you want to try it, spend an evening drinking "hard lemonade" and see for yourself. In DuBouchett's defense, the cordials in their ad here aren't very sugary. Manhattans, vodka, rye... It's nice that Dubouchett wants you to get hammered, but doesn't want your head to explode till tomorrow morning, instead of just before bedtime.

But more importantly, there is a greater mystery here. Double-you tee eff is that weird harlequin evil-looking mascot guy? He's playing that brandy bottle like a guitar, and that implies that he's the life of the party, and he's had more than a few cherry cordials. There's no explanation from simple context in the ad. Is he just DuBouchett's icon/logo?

Whup. He's called "The DuBouchett" man. There's your answer.

https://www.printmag.com/branding/dubouchett-paul-rands-harlequin/

As a piece of corporate branding the harlequin guy is pretty clever. The red and green diamond pattern vibrates your eyes in their sockets and can be spotted easily while flipping thro ugh the pages of a magazine... even after you've had a few cordials, which is just how DuBouchett likes you. Doncha go changing, Drinky McDrunkerson. Their harlequin guy is just kind of weird looking, is all, which is fine, because they're not trying to attract kids to their brand, with enormous, trying-so-hard-it's-creepy smiles and saucer eyes like you see on a cereal box. Here in The Future, with our hyper focus-tested omni-cutesy mascots everywhere, to see a weird jester pirate guy with an inscrutable French expression is refreshing, kind of.

Oh, The French. You're so inscrutable. If you really really like the DuBouchett harlequin man, you can maybe find a plaster one of him on Ebay. It'll cost you, though...

DuBouchett. Does that mean something? I think "bouche" means "mouth". Let's go back to Professor Google and ask.

Say what? "Stuffy"? Let's swap their places and see how "stuffy" translates.

Huh. Odd. Okay, what is French for "mouth", then?

Oookay.

Well, that's our inscrutable French friends for you. They simply cannot be scruted, and neither can their language. Viva France!

Kaiser Golden Dragon - Give it away, give it away now.

"How come everybody want to keep it like the kaiser? Give it away, give it away, give it away now."

"Here in time for Christmas... America's most exciting new car. 1951 Kaiser Golden Dragon." A constant favorite tactic of car advertisements is the idea of buying someone a car for Christmas. Do people do this? Or, maybe the better question is "Do enough people do this to make it worthwhile for the car companies to keep re-using this old advertising trope?" I dunno. Never made it without biting. Ask Mister Owl.

Anyway. What's a Kaiser Golden Dragon? Never seen one, and never heard of one. So, that's why this one had to go into the post today.

By all accounts, the Kaiser didn't do well.
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/1951-1953-kaiser-dragon4.htm
One thing that Kaiser did really well? Names. Man, if there's a better name for a car than a Kaiser Golden Dragon, I haven't heard it. Badass, man.

And, Kaiser kept it going in the names for their options, too. The Golden Dragon was available with a special type of upholstery called "Dragonleather". Pretty damn cool. Uuuh, it was, however, just embossed vinyl. Cue the sad wah-wah trumpet.

Weirdly, articles that I found described the car as being expensive. The Dragon sold for somewhere around $2500, which comes out to just over 25 kilobucks in today's money. Maybe there's better pricing info somewhere else? Maybe I'm too lazy to go look for it. I already got what I wanted. The coolest car name ever.

International Harvester... refrigerators? Femineered!

Whether or not you view the past as "the good old days" or "the dark ages" has everything to do with who you are. If you're a seventy-something year old white guy, 1950 might look pretty rosy when viewed through your particular shade of colored glasses. Let us recall that, in 1950, you could market a refrigerator (which International Harvester apparently did, I guess???) with an ad campaign like "femineered".

If you read the list of features in the copy - things like spaciousness, efficiency, and convenience - you'll be reading a list of things that men absolutely hate in a fridge. We are only left to assume that International Harvester's line of "mangeneered" fridges leaked air like it was made from colanders, had shelves designed to hold everything poorly, fell apart in a week, and consumed as much electricity as everything else in your house combined. Thankfully, International Harvester was there to deduce that only women want a smartly designed product.

Or, it was just a refrigerator, a thing that goes in a kitchen, which made it the sole purview of a woman?

Well, that was a long time ago. We've learned so much since then. Of course, no company now would be dumb enough to patronize fifty percent of the popula- Oh jeez...

https://jalopnik.com/this-car-for-women-designed-by-cosmopolitan-is-about-a-1786899869

What do you get when a women’s magazine like Cosmopolitan wants to create a car for women and teams up with Spanish automaker Seat? You get the Seat Mii by Cosmopolitan, and these are the features that the magazine and Seat decided were necessary: purple or white exterior paint, champagne colored wing mirrors, headlights with an “eyeliner shape,” jeweled wheels and ease of parking.

NuAce mounting corners - Clip arts.

How do you market those little adhesive paper corner things that (sort of) hold the pictures in your photo albums (until they completely don't)? You show the customer a few serving suggestions how they might enjoy their photos so they go "Oh yeah! I do like looking at photos." And, don't forget to come up with a pointless mascot made of your product, for some reason!

Meet Sir Cornerlot. He has a sword, and is gallant, or whatever.

There's lots of useful clip art to be salvaged form this ad. Let's get on that, post haste. We'll just blank out the text and make these people slightly more re-purposeable, shall we? We shall.

See? Aren't they nice? What in the world could they be looking at? Oh, the usual...

You're welcome!!!!!

Boltaflex - One word. Plastics.

Cast your mind back into the mists of time - way back before the time when vinyl was shorthand for "we like the sweaty thighs, but we didn't want to pay for leather". "Plastics" might have meant "advanced and modern tech-nology". Enter, Boltaflex vinyl and/or polyurethane-covered furniture.

Of course, when you think of vinyl seats, you might only think of cracked and peeling car seats that reveal the strange fabric substrate underneath. However, maybe the crazy-hot-to-crazy-cold life of an automotive interior is too tall an order for a plastic that's expected to remain flexible for all eternity? I can promise you, every bus that I ever rode to school always had the one seat that was peeling, that the last kid to get on the bus had no choice but to sit on. It sucked to be Last on the Bus Kid.

Loads of restaurant seats are still vinyl... if you're lucky. A few McDonaldses have just given up and installed hard, molded plastic bench seats, probably made from recycled playground slides. Their point of view can be appreciated. "Keep the customer uncomfortable, so they'll eat their mass-produced slop and immediately fuck off." Smart. Customer rotation means the table is free to accept the asses of the next group of humans that want to spend as little as possible on bulk meal items.

Can you still get a car with vinyl seats? Has the name of vinyl been so besmirched that no one wants them in their car, opting for fabric, if leather is too rich for their blood? When I was a kid, I wanted one of those baseball-type jackets with the wool torso and the leather sleeves, all in some kind of bright, contrasting colors. But mom always said "no way", her reasoning being that the leather sleeves crack, peel, and fall apart in short order. Now, in the fullness of adulthood, I know that this thinking was backwards. It's the jackets with the fake vinyl sleeves that fall apart. Leather just gets better with age. All it needs is a semiannual shmear of conditioner.

I've had a car with leather seats, and taking care of them is no big deal. Just grab a sponge or something and rub any of a thousand commercially available leather goos into them. This chore is made even more enjoyable if you find a leather goo whose smell you enjoy. My goo of choice is Meguiars Gold Class Rich Leather Cleaner/Conditioner. All closed up inside the car, the sun will just off-gas all that delightful chemical miasma for you to enjoy on your next journey. I'm sure my Meguiars Rich Gold Leather Rich Goo has, over the years, knocked more than a few letter grades off my I.Q., but I'm not bothered. Brain me good fine feel. Nose like eat leather goo.

Anyway, the two delighted ladies in this ad? You know, the ones that love the sweaty thighs but don't want to pay for leather? It might be handy to borrow their campy astonishment for whatever image you cook up in your computer. Family cookout flyer? Better with excited sweaty-thigh ladies, for sure. Get ready to right-click these two dames onto you hard drive in three, two, one, RIGHTCLICK NOW! You're welcome.

BSA Gold Vase - Greatest Sports Model Ever

"Who?" I know what you mean. Apparently BSA made bicycles. If you're a Yank, you could be forgiven for never having heard of BSA, as they haven't had a presence in the U.S. market for a bunch of years, but they were a major player in England.

BSA stands for Birmingham Small Arms. They got their start way back in 1861, making guns. Unsurprisingly, a factory that made gun parts was pretty easily adaptable for making bicycle parts - you know, precision machining metal parts for long service life.

So, in 1880, BSA branched out into bicycle manufacture, with the Otto Dicycle, which looked like this....

Yikes. Perhaps BSA recognized that they could do better for themselves. Instead of building the kooky "Dicycle" for another company, they began making the more conventionally-designed "safety bicycle" under their own brand, later in the 1880s.

This led kind of naturally to building motorcycles under the Triumph brand, peaking in the 1950's and 60's. Later, when BSA got out of bicycles, selling off that part of their business to Raleigh.

Before they gave up on making bikes, BSA did make one of the best internally-geared hubs in history. Sturmey-Archer hubs were brilliant and nearly indestructible three-speed hubs that demanded nearly zero maintenance. They were on the best bikes back in The Fifties. You know Pee-Wee Herman's precious red bike? It probably had a Sturmey-Archer rear hub on it.

This ad proclaims the Gold Vase (the model pictured in the ad) as "The greatest sports model ever". Look at the size of that saddle bag. What did people carry around in 1950 when they were out "sporting"? You could put a loaf of bread in that bag... or a pair of shoes... or a pair of breadshoes.

Maybe you're feeling a little nostalgic for the BSA you had when you were a kid, and also English? Well, the Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade have harvested a couple of elements from today's ad and made up a shirt, which you can actually buy and actually wear, if that's what you're into. Maybe yellow's not your thing, or being a lady? Other colors and a bunch of different kinds of shirt are also up there, including man stuff. Here's the link.

Murder Whiskey

Radio Schedule, June 18th, 1950

Vitalis - Devo hair and coffee.

Guess what, hair fans? The Pendulum of Hair has re-re-re-swung, and now the haircut your grandpa had is now back in style.... at least among those young enough to think they invented it.

Guys like the square in this Vitalis ad? Well, their patience has paid off, and now your dad's dad is cool again.

Special paragraph for trendy twentysomethings:

Congratulations on bravely inventing the shiny parted-on-the-side hair helmet. We never would have thought of that without you around! Please keep inventing outrageous new styles so we can all learn from you! Here's another participation trophy and a juice box!

Resuming normal communication:

Back in The Eighties, there was a punk band - yes, a PUNK band, not a new wave band - called Devo who satirically wore plastic hair exactly like the guy in this Vitalis ad. It was, like everything they did, a mockery of the blandness and sameyness of their parents' generation. It's kinda funny that that's now cool. Does satire stop working when the subject of your satire returns to popularity? I don't know. I never made it without biting. One. Two Thuh-ree...

There's some nice, harvestable clip arts in this ad. Two coffee people and a guy smearing Vitalis onto his head. It'd sure be nice to have them on a transparent background, wouldn't it? Phil Are GO! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade, ASSEMBLE!

That'll do nicely. You can use your rude finger to right-click-save these persons onto your hard drive for a rainy day. What kind of rainy day? Well, maybe the kind of rainy day when someone 'round your workplace needs to be gently reminded that they live in a civilized society with certain understood rules that are part of the accepted social contract, like perhaps taking twenty seconds to make a new pot of coffee after grabbing the last cup? That's not too much to ask, is it? Some would say it is, but those people are sociopaths, and their opinions are suspect. Here's a serving suggestion, but if you get in trouble for using it, I don't know you...

Honor Brand Frozen Foods - An comic strip. Ha. Ha. Ha.

Hey, seasonal eaters! Are you looking for a great Thanksgiving comic strip for your Autumnal Localized Harvest Feast? Well, look no firther than this hi-larious ad from Honor brand Frozen Foods, and then look further than this ad from Honor Brand Frozen Foods!

Ah-hahahahahahahaha! get it? The funny part is that the turkey doesn't want his slaughtered corpse to be placed next to an inferior brand of side dish.

This pretty morbid and weird, but we can do one better: The Star-Kist tuna campaign in which Charlie the Tuna yearns for acceptance from the Star-Kist tuna company.

It's an old cmapaign, and for decades, the humor in the ads stemmed from Charlie's misunderstanding that Star-Kist wanted tunas with good taste, as opposed to tunas that taste good. However, somewhere in The Eighties, Star-Kist abandoned this angle, and Charlie seemed to finally understand what the tuna giant was after. This changed his attitude not at all.

One thousand and six years ago, when I worked at a cartoon studio, one of our reliable clients was Star-Kist. We animated a number of those commercials, and at that time, Charlie definitely seemed to have a suicidal fascination with being killed, ground into a sort of paste, packed in a can, and eaten by humans. It was weird.

Sadly, the P.A.G. Research and Googling Squad can find none of our commercials on FaceTube, but this one from 1983 (not animated by us) is a decent example of Charlie's weird obsession.

This commercial doesn't have the long-time tag line "Sorry, Charlie. Star-Kist doesn't want tunas with good taste. Star-Kist wants tunas that taste good." By 1983, someone seems to have straightened Charlie out... not that he seems to care.

Ick. Frikkin' bizarre.

Aaaaanyway, it's not every day you find a thanksgiving Graphic Gift, so we'll take them where we find them. Here's the super funny cartoon from this 1950 ad, minus the caption, in original papery form and a cleaned-up line art versions. Maybe you can use it to make your Thanksgiving invitations more adorable disturbing? You may stand a better chance of having lots of leftovers all to yourself. Diabolically clever, I must say.

You're welcome!

Life Magazine, Sept 4, 1950 - A couple of avatars.

Aren't you tired your face? Sure! We all do! Fix your virtual identity with these stupid avatars and / or profile pictures from the Sept 4th, 1950 issue of LIFE Magazine!

First, there's this Vitalis ad, featuring a Handsome White Man so wooden and generic, he could be a Gerry Anderson puppet. Now that's F.A.B.!

Then there's the female appreciant, without whom we wouldn't understand how indescribably desirable is a man with well-varnished hair. She's super into whatever you place next to her, once we pop her out of her natural context. Now, she's completely promiscuous with her positivity! Just how we like 'em.

Her spank bank's just been filled.

Next up, we have a promotional shot of Marie Wilson as Lady Teazle, from (apparently) some kind of play called The School for Scandal. Here, she's looking a lot like Shelley Duvall as Panzy from Time Bandits, which is a piece of culture that I did not have to look up using Google.

See? "Oh, Panzy! The problem! The problem!!!"

Last, we have a group of random Russian people from a cold-war-era profile on patriotism in the Soviet Union. The article seems to be an unbiased and even-handed exploration of Russian pride, but the people they chose to use as examples of "everyday Russians" seem a wee bit propagandist, if you get my meaning.

Anyway, the babushka lady looks like she knows her way around a potato pancake, and she can whip some up while sitting on top of your online profile, why not?

The shepherd guy was way ahead of the curve. Cowboy Bebop wouldn't exist for another 48 years, but he's rocking the Spike Spiegel hair like he invented it. That's some good cosplay, Russia!