Blitz Burner - Burning your trash the modern way.

Okay. In 1955, Climate Change / Global Warming were not really things that science was worried about... or even had names for. People commonly burned garbage in their yards. As far as anyone knew, the soot and smoke simply went up into the sky and just kept on going, up into space. There was no way that human activity could possibly have a cumulative effect on the entire planet, so far as anybody knew.

Leaving environmental responsibility aside, there are still some eyebrow-raising things about this ad for the Blitz Burner.

Back in '55, your average backyard incinerator was a concrete affair with a rusty wrought-iron grating somewhere on it to let the smoke out, and keep woodland varmints from getting in or something. I don't think anybody ever had the notion to use the thing as a grill.

Sure, the possibility was obvious. A thing with fire in it and a metal rack on top, at pretty much perfect grilling height, no less. Who wouldn't have thought of using it to cook food? Anyone who came within a few yards of it, that's who. Burning trash stinks, and the smell of it, and the general effluvium, tended to marry itself eternally to the very structure of whatever it was burned in.

People burned pretty much any kind of household garbage that was even vaguely flammable in their backyard incinerators. Old rotten food, and especially unpleasant diapers that were irretrievably filthy. Anything that was awful enough that you wanted to kill with fire went into the family incinerator. That was the point.

But the clever folks at Montamower Distributing Co. weren't squeamish about using the same thing you burn garbage in to cook food. Let's assume that you wouldn't be using a trash fire to cook burgers. Montamower probably intended its customers to toss in a few mesquite logs or something. Still... wow.

There's a reason this idea never caught on. But maybe, in the Blitz Burner's defense, since the unit was all metal, you could concievably hose it out, fresh and clean, every time you used it, making it hunky-dory for cooking food with. ...Mmmmmaybe.

Still, no way.

And then there's the name. In 1955, World War 2 was just ten years into memory. America was enjoying a booming economy and the invention of the suburbs was making it possible for loads of (usually white) people to enjoy a little bit of the American Dream.

In London, however, they were still smarting from having most of their city bombed into gravel after a little thing called "the Blitz", courtesy of the Third Reich. So, to name your new product the Blitz Burner has all the tact of marketing... say.... a bug spray, calling it "The 9/11 of hornets". It's kind of hard to imagine that nobody asked the boss if they was sure about that idea.

Click for 1600 px.

Click for 1000 px social media profile picture sort of thing.

Ironized Yeast - Gain Flesh!

Mmmmm, flesh! Wonderful and delightful... depending greatly on whose you're picturing, of course. This ad from 1934 is for ironized yeast. You have to read the whole thing to sort of figure that out, but it's there, right at the end. It's weird how they're shy about their name... which sounds more like an ingredient than a company name. Imagine if every company were that straightforward. "Drink new Sugar Water! The choice of a new generation."

The skinny guy in this ad is frowning at the girl, wishing he could "gain flesh". Who talks like that? Our old buddy Nineteen Thirty-Four, that's who! Man, Thirty-Four, you're one creepy dude. Go ahead and try it. Stare hard at someone today and mutter about how you'd like to "gain flesh". See how that goes down with your fellow humans.

The guy in the ad looks like a light bulb, with his too-big head. It's almost as if he were Photoshopped or something, but we know that, back in '34, you'd need a PC the size of a planet to run Photoshop. Nope. All they had were airbrushes.

But we have Photohsop! Let's pop this light bulb out of his ad so he can live on, in your hard drive, to one day frown creepily at something else perhaps.

If you don't have P-shop, just read along and dream of the day when you get your very own planetputer, so you can create seamless visual wizardry like this.

P.A.G! Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade! Assemble! Pkshoww! I need you to do a standard extraction procedure on ol' Bulby there, and do screen grabs every step of the way. Hop to it!  Move! Move!

FYI: This next bit is pretty much for Photoshop beginners. If you're some kind of seasoned pro, you can go do something else or just practice looking smug.

Photoshop is pretty much just selecting areas of pixels and doing things to them. Almost every tool available to you does one of those two things in various fancy ways.

First thing you'll need is the Pen Tool. In case you're not 112 years old and have never owned a fountain pen, it's the thing in the tool bar that looks like an arrowhead... in case you're three hundred to sixty thousand years old and own a bow and arrow.

Start click-and-dragging your way around Bulby. Try to remember only to create a new control point when you need your line to change direction, as opposed to just dropping a new point every few pixels. Down that road madness lay.

Don't forget to do the opening between his legs. Heh.

Once your path is complete, in the Paths palette (which can be opened in the pulldown menu WINDOW/PATHS), click the obscure stack of lines in the upper right. Some people who have never seen a hamburger call this "the hamburger". It will open a popout menu. Tell it to MAKE SELECTION.

Photoshop will then ask you if you want to feather the selection. Sure, why not? One pixel sounds pretty good. Depending on the resolution of the image, a pixel may be not enough, just right, or too much. Trust your eyes. Photohsop will let you feather a selection by a fraction of a pixel, too. So, in case one pixel is too much, you can try .5, or .2, etc., etc.

Now that Bulby is selected and feathered, he's ready to get peeled out of the ad like a sticker. The quickest way to do this is by using the key command CTRL J. Press them simultaneously. If you're on a Mac, the CTRL key is the "command" key, which I believe has a thing that looks like a clover on it.

This CTRL+J command takes a selected area of pixels and tears it off onto a new layer in exactly the same spot. Don't believe me? Open up the layers palette (yes WINDOW/LAYERS) and see for yourself. Bulby should be a layer above the "bacnground" layer.

By clicking the eye next to the background layer, you can hide it, and see Bulby on a transparent background, which in most graphics programs is represented by a grey and white checkered pattern.

But his feet! They're incomplete! Not to worry. We will use our Photoshop Superpowers to seamlessly complete the feet in a perfectly undetectable and natural way.

When you really think about it, feet are pretty much just hands for your legs, right? Even more so if you're a monkey. And we're got some hands right in this very picture. Go get em!

Turn the background layer back on and highlight that layer in the layers palette. This tells P-Shop you need to work on that layer.

Using your newfound pen tool powers, make a path around the girl's hand. Zoom in if you need to, by using the hotkeys CTRL - or CTRL +. Those zoom you in and out. Now you know two hotey commands. It's like you invented this thing.

Remember when you made a selection from the path a little while ago? Too many steps, right? Fuck that shit. This is quicker.

Any path you make with the pen tool will appear in the PATHS palette (open it with the pulldown menu WINDOW/PATHS). You can make a selection out of a path by just holding CTRL and clicking on "work path". Boom. Done.

Once a selection is made, feather the edge by one pixel. There's a hotkey for this (SHIFT F6), but you can use the pulldown menu SELECT/MODIFY/FEATHER.

By using CTRL J, put the selected hand on its own layer. Bulby's foot is going to be perfect.

It's pointing the wrong way! And, rotating it (CTRL T, for "transform") wont' fix that. Nomatter. 

Use EDIT/TRANSFORM/FLIP HORIZONTAL to , duh, flip horizontal. Now you can finish the transform.

A little rotation and scaling can all be done while still in the "transform". When the handfoot looks to have size and proportion that's perfect and natural and not at all weird, hit ENTER.

The seam between the two layers needs to be softer. In the layers palette, you can adjust the opacity of Bulby to see howmuch overlap you have.

In the tool bar, get the eraser tool. It sort of looks like an eraser. By pressing F5, you can open the BRUSH palette. Look for a brush tip that's pretty soft. Also, turn the opacity of the brush all the way up. We'll use the soft edge of the brush to softly fade off the edge of Bulby's foot.

Using the soft eraser brush you've made, just dither away the hard edge on Bulby's leg. There's still some weird gap down at the bottom of his handfoot, though.

We're going to use a magical and much-abused tool to fix that. The Clone Stamp tool!

It's in the tool bar, and looks like - wonder of wonders - a rubber stamp!




The clone stamp tool works by sampling an area of pixels, and then painting them into a different area as you go. First, get the clone stamp tool by clicking on it.

We need to make the underside of his foot angle upwards to meet the underside of his new handfoot. Check the layers palette to be sure you're working on the layer with his heel and ankle on it. With the clone stamp tool active, hold ALT and click the part of his foot we want to "borrow". You'll notice your brush will have a little preview of the sampled area in it. This is meant to help you align the bit you're going to paint. It may take some trial and error, but the part near his heel will bridge that funny gap to the right.

See? It's nearly perfect! There's just a tonal mismatch between the front and back of Bulby's handfoot. Since they're separate layers, it's easy to fix.

Click the layer with his fingertoes on it. Then, hit CTRL U, for "hue/saturation" adjustment.

The fingertoes are too yellow. Saturation down by 21 and darken by 8, and Bulby's own bulbmother wouldn't know we did anything at all to him!

But humans have two feet, and Bulby needs two, too. Click the layer with his fingertoes on it, and hit CTRL J. This duplicates the layer. You can also use the LAYER pulldown to access the DUPLICATE LAYER command.

To help hide the fact that one handfoot is just a copy of the other one, let's delete that one fingertoe in back. We'll just pretend there's a fourth fingertoe there when we slide this handfoot behind the other.

Get the old pen tool out and trace the toefinger we need to slice off. Hold still, Bulby. This may hurt a lot! Like before, go to the paths palette and CTRL click the path to make it a selection.

Now, feather the selection by one pixel. use SHIFT 5 to make that happen.

Hitting the DELETE key will amputate Bulby's fingertoe. Man, skinny men just can't get a break.

Next, we'll move the foot into position with the move tool. You can slide over and click on the move tool, if you're a loser, or you can be a cool guy and just hit V (for moVe).

Once his totally not copied handfoot is in place, rotate it just like before with the good old CTRL T command.

Nearly done. We need to soften the seam between his back foot and its toefingers. We'll use the eraser again, but well make a selection to keep from erasing any of the front handfoot.

Draw a selection of the back handfoot, carefully leaving out any of the front one. Then, using the eraser like before, smooth out the foot/fingertoes transition by erasing the front edge of his ankle or foot or whatever you call it.

Click for 1600 px.

There! Now save him out as a PNG (to preserve his background transparency) Bulby is ready to frown angrily at whatever you want! Aren't you lucky?

You're welcome!

All Bulby wanted to do was to "gain flesh", and thanks to Photoshop, he got what he wanted. He gained some fleshy handfeet. And, in the end, isn't that what really matters?

Borden's Evaporated Milk - A domestic disturbance.

It's been a while since we heard from the unholy spokesmonstrosities from Borden's. Let's hear from Elsie The Cow, Elmer The Cow, Beulah The Cow, and Beauregard The Cow, just in time for Halloween. No, I did not make those names up. The Nineteen-Forties did.

In this 1950 ad, our happy family of crimes against nature are bickering about careers and sexism. If that doesn't make you want to buy dehydrated milk, I don't know what does. Setting aside the fact that dehydrated milk pretty much sells itself because it's so delightful to enjoy with your mouth, the The Cow family are going for the hard sell, teaching us that nothing says "dehydrated bits of milk" like threatening to storm out of the house if your wife doesn't STFU. Aah, The Fifties. Simpler times, man.

Technically, Borden's is being pretty progressive, for 1950, anyway. In this hilarious narrative, Elsie is being portrayed as the example of "rightness", while Elmer seems to be used here an example of old-fashioned thinking. Maybe? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.









And yet, if Borden's was so modern and forward thinking and stuff, why did they feel the need to name their ice cream "Lady Borden"? Was there a "Man Borden" flavor, with whiskers in it?

However, no sooner is the feminine ice cream mentioned than the company quickly reassures us, by having Elmer remind us that it's okay for men to enjoy Lady Borden too. So, it seems safe to eat it without fear of turning "all funny".

Shew! It's okay, guys! We can eat this ice cream. The family of cartoon cows with the weird neckpenises says so!

Perhaps next time we cover a Borden's ad, we can do a detailed examination of a family of cows that relishes eating food made from their own milk. Won't that be nice?

Bauer movie cameras - Yep. Good, clean fun.

Going to the beach this Halloween? Why not pick up a cheap-as-chips Bauer movie camera to preserve all the not-at-all questionable shenanigans and fun stuff you do to a girl there?

So, you're planning a beach trip with four of your buddies and one girl, just like always. Ho hum. This time, buy a Bauer 8 millimeter movie camera!

Click for 1000 px avatar.

That way, you can relive wonderful moments, like when you all bounced her on that blanket, and she went so high you couldn't quite tell if she was afraid you were going to break her back or not. HA ha ha ha ha! Wasn't that fun? She was kind of laughing, right? Yeaaah! Totally laughing!

Or that thing you all did when she dozed off on that towel, after she calmed down from the towel-trampoline thing, that is. That sure was a mess to clean up, huh? Ha ha ha ha ha!

Or how about you grilled hot dogs at lunch time, and you all made her do that one thing she didn't want to do with one? What a hoot!

Now that you've got it all on film, you can get an extra copy developed and give it to her, so she can enjoy the memories over and over again, right?

Only, she hasn't been around in a while. Where did she go? She doesn't answer her phone any more. That's funny. You though you were all friends... your four guy buddies and her. Ah well. You're sure she's just busy or something.

Hey! Cool! Good thing you got an extra copy of the movie made! The cops are at the door and they want to see the film! They probably just want to see what a great time you all had, because you're all such great friends! This is going to be great! Wait! Before you answer the door, get your Bauer movie camera, so you can capture the moment!

Man, 1970 is going to be the best year ever!

Christy Trades School - Earn big money, Pac-Man.

So you're Pac-Man, and you've graduated from high school, and you're wondering what's next. Maybe you could get a desk job, but that's just not for you, am I right? You're good with your hands. There's hope for a man like you.

If you're good with your hands, Christy Trades School can teach you to fix appliances at home in your spare time. That's not such a bad opportunity, is it? Better jump at it while you can. I mean, it's not like someone's going to pay you to just eat all day, are they?

Here's your Handypacman avatar, ready for all your social networky, chat servicey, online profiley type of things. Everyone will assume it's something Japanese, but everyone are jerks. Why do you hang out with jerks like that? Stop hanging out with that "everyone" crowd. You can do better, buddy,

Click for 1000 px.

UPDATE: Helpful Reader Gunnar did himself some P-Shopping and extracted Pan-Man from this ad, and then extracted Pac-Man's eyes. He didn't mention what he did with Pac-Man's extracted eyes, but the world's probably better off not knowing. There's also a serving suggestion for what kind of fun you could get up to with the PNG he created. Thanks, Gunnar!

Botany 500 - Fashion Flare-Up.

It must have been easy to be an advertising art director in The Seventies The Very Late Sixties. Conceptualizing an ad for magazines like Esquire in '69, you could assume your readership had A) Plenty of money, and B) a consuming need for trendiness, no matter what.

As 1969 men's fashions go, this blue plaid suit is not the craziest thing you could expect to see. In fact, it's quite reasonable, coming from the era that gave us, uuh, this.

So, let's say you're 1969. How do you sell a suit to potential customers with loads of cash who insist on following the latest cultural departure from reason? You put your suit on a handsome dude and build a 1/4-inch plywood Peter Max holiday pantomime, of course. Grab a pretty model from your file cabinet full of headshots and paint her face like a trippy, puckish nymph. Wait. A prop. We need a prop. Eyeball cutout on a stick saves the day!

Advertising complete! Zeitgeist captured! Now, just put your feet up on your desk, blow a jay, and wait for the art direction awards to start rolling in.

Oh, by the way. $99.50 and $120 are about $100 and $600, respectively, in today's modern Futurebucks.