Bisquick - Pancake it till you make it.

Breakfast. For some people, it's the first meal of the day. And yet, for millions of Americans, they run out the door without taking the time to have a healthy, well-rounded - oh fuck that. Look at this groovy picture of pancakes from The Seventies.

By the early The Eighties the airbrush would sweep across the advertising world as the unheralded messiah of lazy, cheesy commercial art. People would love the hell out of  airbrush art, and it would later come to typify The Eighties so much, that by The Nineties, it would be (thankfully) played out, and regarded as lame as a pair of parachute pants.

In 1984, if you carried this Trapper Keeper, you were the coolest kid in homeroom. By 1990, you were a big lame, and maybe still sitting in homeroom.

An airbrush, in the hands of a really skilled airbrusher, is an amazing wondertool. Like any other media (you know: oils, pencil, etc. Not "media" as in "television" or "newspapers"), a master will make it hard to tell what they used to create the artwork. You'll hear people say things like "That's colored pencil? You're kidding me!".

So, yeah, an airbrush is not inherently stupid. It's just a tool. However, like any other annoying fad, like autotune, lens flare, or sampling, if it makes things easier to do, you can rest assured it will be wildly overused by way too many people people who use it as their shortcut to being "a artist". If they couldn't be an artist without their favorite gimmick, they're not an artist. They're a lazy fraud and a hack. There will always be a market for work like this. So, yay for lazy hackfrauds.

What's the airbrush of today? Hmm. Pick one. Computers have made it pretty easy to do nearly anything by clicking a few keys. Photoshop, for example. What's that other thing where you can replace people's faces in video and create fake revenge porn? Something like that, probably.

Okay, rant complete.

What's with the airbrush talk, anyway? This 1976 breakfast illustration looks kind of like it started with some airbrush to get started, and then maybe some watercolor or guache over that. You can see some brush strokes in the details at the edge of the plate, for example. Then there's the texture of the pancakes, which looks a lot like colored pencil. See? A good artist can work with a number of different tools and make it hard to tell how they did it.

Look at that breakfast, all shiny and glistening, like it's covered in rich, delicious vinyl. I don't know what this style would be called, but it's very Seventies. Someone should probably harvest it, pop it over an alpha channel background and save it away for a rainy day. Maybe someone will have a The Seventies-themed pancake party (god help us all)?

Hey! Look what a randomly chosen P.A.G. Graphic Blandishment and Photoshoppery Brigade staffer has done! Popped this groovy breakfast out of the ad and onto a nice transparent layer and saved it off as a PNG! Neat! Thanks, P.A.G.G.B.P.B. staffer! As for the rest of the ultranet... you're welcome! Graphic Gift incoming!!!

Click for 1600px.

Pabst TAPaCan - Technology at work.

This ad for Babst beer makes a big deal of the packaging. Why's that? Turns out, in 1936, getting beer into a can without turning into skunkwater was a big deal.

For the full story, you can read this website, whose credentials we can't be bothered to verify. The simple enthusiasm of beer fans is enough for me to buy into the timeline presented at keglined.com.

The long at the short of it is that beer goes bad in a hurry when in contact with metal, and it wasn't until 1935 or so that the American Can Company worked out the vinyl-based coating (with the help of Union Carbide) on the inside of beer cans that keeps the beer from turning into whiz. "Keglined" became a trademark of ACCO in 1934, during the development process. As of '35, you could buy decent beer in cans, which was exciting more for the retailer than the customer. Bottles seal just as well as cans (for good flavor), but as the ad states, cans allow greater density on shelves, due to their stackability. Fair enough, but that's big news for the guy selling the beer, rather than the guy buying it, as the illustration suggests.

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There's some nice 1935 deco in this ad. There's something interesting going on here. Rule #1 of advertising art is "don't bury the product shot". You'd think that airbrushing the characters and the skyline would make them the focal point of the composition. leaving the comparatively flat beer can in the man's arms to take a back seat. However, by leaving the can free of shading, the artist has retained maximum contrast and clarity so that it pops out at you, despite being so small. Clever.

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Climax Moly - Decogasm.

In the altogether more innocent year of 1936, you could name a company "Climax Molybdenum" Company" without attracting too many muffled snorts of mirth (I love that band, BTW), even if your board of directors were all fourteen year old boys. Today, putting the words "Climax Moly" in your ad sounds like you're soliciting prostitution. It is possible there may come a day when we people living in 2012 seem quaint and innocent. It's hard to think how, but it has to be possible.

This ad comes from a 1936 issue of Fortune magazine, the publication read by the Monopoly guy (Whose name was once "Rich Uncle Pennybags, but has since been changed to "Mr. Monopoly". Sad.). Fortune is now somehow siamese twinned with CNN and Money magazine, but back in Yore, it was just a super thick monthly simply dripping with mouth-watering deco eye-candy. Art Deco was inspired by industry, and captains of industry read Fortune.

The picture in this ad was airbrushed. For those who don't know but are interested, here's a quick explanation. Those who care but already know or don't know and don't care can skip the next paragraph. The ones who don't care are probably reading OMG and, if they ever wound up at PAG!, it was only by accident, and only hung around long enough to go "what-EVERRRR".

Fishes with her bare hands, and votes.

An airbrush is a cool-looking little spray gun you hold like a pen. It's connected to a compressed air supply (usually a motorized compressor), and it atomizes paint into a spray and allows the artist to control the air-to-paint mix with a fancy trigger. Regrettably, some artists see the airbrush as The Only Tool They Need, and embark on a career painting T shirts at the mall for people who don't know any better and don't deserve any better. As I have ranted before, airbrush art generally looks like airbrush art, and while it does take a lot of skill to control the thing well enough to use, the barrier of entry with regard to taste is the lowest of the low.

According to Wikipedia, The first real commercial atomizing airbrush was presented at the World's Columbian Exposition (World's Fair)  in Chicago in 1893. Hey, cool! Also, the same World's Fair was the scene of the world's first serial murderer, as described in Devil in the White City, (which is an okay book - equal parts interesting history lesson, tedious history lesson, and tedious procedural crime drama.)

Lots of Art Deco flat art utilized the airbrush. Deco is typified by dramatic color, minimalist design, stark silhouettes and clean lines, which lend themselves very well to the cut-stencil technique involved in airbrushing.

In this factory scene, we see a load of scrap metal being loaded into a rail car on a magnetic crane. Clouds of backlit smoke supply your standard deco drama. Silhouettes of smokestacks and factory windows were obviously sprayed over an adhesive stencil, or "frisket", cut with an X-Acto knife. Climax is trumpeting the benefits of molybdenum steel, as opposed to ordinary mild steel, for structural engineering. Moly steel is stronger, is less effected by heat, and less prone to failure. Climax's angle is that it's more expensive to replace a part than to make it stronger the first time. Fair enough.

I learned to say "molybdenum" around the age of ten when my dad bought me a second hand Team Mongoose BMX frame, and built me my first good bike. The frame was "chromoly", which is an alloy of chromium, molybdenum, and good old steel. It made for a lighter, stronger frame. Chromoly is still used for things like roll cages in racing cars and, believe it or not, bike frames. Large bike manufacturers have moved on to aluminum and carbon fiber, but there are still small boutique bike manufacturers that do incredible things with steel (chromoly is still a type of steel) like Surly and Salsa. In the hands of a really good fabricator, chromoly steel can be as light and agile as aluminum without the harshness that comes with a typical ALU frame. When aluminum flexes, it suffers, and eventually will break. It's best to keep aluminum from flexing. But steel can be made into a spring, with clever tempering. A steel frame can be designed to absorb rough vibration without transmitting it to the rider, but an aluminum bike frame built strong enough to last will have to be thick enough to be harsh.

Anyway, please enjoy our special crop of this deco factory scene for your next CD cover, if you still use those things. We present it in slightly-higher-than-normal 2400px size, unpolluted by our watermark, for your delight. You're welcome.

Click for extra big.

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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.

Iron Lung 4-Pack - Capsule hotel?

Here's something you don't see every day. No, not four Americans in Japanese capsule hotels. No, not people in iron lungs. Maybe you should just stop guessing and let me tell you, okay? Shut up. It's a completely airbrushed head where there was  no head before!

But first, what's an iron lung? Uuh, let's see. How to summarize. People who couldn't breathe on their own (usually from polio) were put in a machine like this one. An air tight seal is formed around the person's neck, and by using pumps to vary the pressure around the person's body, it effectively reproduced the process of respiration... if you can accept the fact that you're stuck in a giant metal tube. Good times.

Iron lungs were in widest use in the 40s and 50s, due to polio outbreaks. Polio is a viral illness that attacks the nervous system and eventually causes paralysis. Respiratory failure (paralyzed lungs) is one of the first ways polio tries to kill you. Since the mid-century, the polio vaccine has all but eradicated the disease (...but not if Jenny McCarthy has her way. Good job, retard.) People still need mechanical assistance with breathing for various reasons, but much smaller, portable ventilators now exist which allow some mobility and don't make you look like you live in The Matrix.

So what's this about a fake head? Check out the lady in the picture in the top at the back. It looks like they only had three models and had to paint in a fourth head. Either that, or for some reason or other, this model's face had to be completely replaced by an artist. Orrrr, she died shortly before the photo was taken and nobody noticed until after the shoot. Orrrrrr, the unfortunate woman not only suffered from polio, but had to be fitted with a prosthetic head, possibly due to a mishap in a magic show. Orrrrrrrrrrr, she's a mannequin who has trouble breathing, poor thing. Let's assume the head was just painted.

Champion Spark Plugs - The mothership connection.

Here's the Champion mother ship, guiding a happy family on their "vacation tour" through, uuh, El Paso, if the picture on my salsa jar is accurate... and salsa's never lied to me before.

I wanted to complete the P-Funk joke with some kind of "flash light" reference, in connection with the picture in the ad, but I came up empty on that. Note to self: have the assistant editor leave out that last sentence in the final post. No one must believe a joke was stillborn on my watch.

So, to hear Champion tell it, all you need to do is check your plugs and all you'll have to worry about on your "vacation tour" is adjusting your carburetor every 45 minutes due to the changing climate as you drive south into the salsa label. Oh, and watch those corners. Your tires are probably bias ply, as opposed to radials. They'll deform badly under side loads... not that your 75 horsepower Oldsmobuick can achieve a speed likely to make that happen. Old cars are fun to look at, but just believe your modern car is a better thing to drive. Sorry, Dad.

So anyway, somebody spent a lot of time airbrushing that giant spark plug. This was 1941, and computers were still grunting and banging rocks together. So, there were no P-Shop All Stars just yet (Yes! Funkadelic joke redemption!). Everything in that spark plug was masked with frisket material (adhesive film), cut with an X-Acto knife and sprayed with an airbrush. The detail in the metal knurling (yep, that's what it's called) on the spark plug must have been an absolute chore to do. Eff that.

Who did all that work? We do have a hard-to-read signature. In a demonstration of the frreaky power of the web, I searched on "ickery" and "artist" a few different ways and came up with John Vickery. Is it him?

Well, there are a few posters like this one that look like the same artist painted them. But, the clincher is his signature, found on "identifyartistsignatures.com". Scully, we have a match.
Vickery was an Australian artist who did a lot of commercial work but also did lots of interesting modern stuff, it turns out. It's always interesting to see what people prefer to do when they're not on the clock. Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about him at all, but the exhibition page in that link says he died in 1983, just when the video game industry crashed. Coincidence? Yep.

Lastly, here's a piece of sciency weirdness I found out while I was looking up bias ply tires in preparation to ridicule them: the steel wire bead in car tires generates a magnetic field when you're driving. What the eff? Not scary or life-changing, but very weird. Here's the study by the Berne University of Applied Sciences.

Lancer Pools - Car from another world.

Just ten or so pages past the ad with the bear from another dimension, we find this pool/car dimensionally anomalous ad for Lancer pools in the very same 1959 issue of Life magazine. We'll go easy on them in the "execution" column because their art comping tools amounted to scissors and glue. However, they still get graded heavily on concept and design. Lancer Pools: negative a million for baffling decisions.

Painting of suburban backyard. Check. Happy ethnocentric white bread family enjoying pool. Check. Price of pool printed large and tilty to show how excited we should be. Check. Pasted-in photograph of a super compact car. Check. Doubleyou tee eff?

"Hi Becky! I just thought I'd come see your new pool in my new extra-realistic car. Hope you don't mind that I brought my loosely-painted daughter along! I think you'll notice she's loosely painted, just like me and my absent husband. I can't help but notice you're loosely painted too, as is your back yard. That's all great, but how do you like my totally realistic car? Pretty distracting, huh?"

Let's reserve judgment. Maybe the company had a tie-in with a car manufacturer?

Hey! Check it out! For some reason, Lancer DID mention that their pools are so affordable, everyone can buy a second car, specifically, a Renault Dauphine! Why? No idea. But, the car totally upstages the pool, which presumably is supposed to be the star of the show. Frikkin' weird, man.

Also, the pool features hygen-ioned-ness, which will keep your family from growing a shiny layer of algae or something... unless that's what you're into, in which case BOOO for hynegne-inoeen!

Mars Bar - Made with rich creamery brains.

Back in Yore (1950), there was no Photoshop. This places 1950 at a disadvantage. They didn't have wonderful things like Photoshop Disasters to laugh at. Yes, the proliferation of illegal copies of Adobe's image-mangling software has placed the tools of personal humiliation in the hands of every multicellular life form in the first and second worlds, but it still takes skill and a good eye to judge what to do, how to do it, how much to do, and when to frikkin stop trying, for chrissakes. Don't get me started.

It was still the case even before the dawn of digital fakery. All they had was the airbrush. This ad for Mars bars has some nice retouching. The candy bar has been "plussed up" as they say. The spoons of various sugary goops look tempting and savory. Good job faking in the giant candy bar in the woman's arms. She was shot holding nothing, and the product picture was spliced in with an X-Acto and rubber cement.  Know what, though? The lady holding the candy bar looks like a Stepford wife.

The art director probably asked the artist to touch up her face. That's some pretty fine work for the time. I don't know how large a print they had to work on, but they should have stayed away from the eyes. You'd need a print the size of a soccer field to have the control and detail you'd need to do it right. But, clearly all the photo print shops with FIFA-sized development baths were booked that weekend, and the artist was handed a print maybe 18x24 inches. "Do up her eyes." the art director ordered. "Make em blue. Everybody needs blue eyes." Prick. It was the fifties after all. White people didn't want to be reminded that there were non-honkies in their country unless they were mowing their lawn.

So, what you're left with is this dead-eyed zombie woman staring at nothing. Or actually, she's staring at TWO nothings, since she's slightly walleyed. What may have helped her is a little mascara. They dropped in two blue dots and her eyes became flat and dead, like a doll's eyes. Here's my five-minute attempt to fix it a little. I just put her eyelashes back in and added some depth to the blue dots. Now she's less scary. Now I can sleep tonight. I didn't like the idea that a zombie woman was selling me candy made from sweet, delicious brains.

Sanka - "Airbrush" rhymes with "awful".

I'm sure there are some examples of airbrushing that are quite good. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that those examples' goodness rises in direct proportion to their undetectability. What I mean is, good airbrushing is invisible. This ad from Sanka typifies what makes airbrush so awful.

In 1973, when this Sanks ad ran in Good Housekeping, airbrushing stood on the precipice of it's ascendency. Fancy words, huh? The airbrush would come to define the eighties. Most notably, it's presence would be felt on hundreds of shitty album covers like This lady who calls herself "Brooke" and Boston's entire discography. These album covers are recognizable, and the music's quality may be debatable, but I insist that these renderings are pretty bad. You look at them and instantly go "airbrush". The technique is very hard to disguise, and rarely is. In fact, in the eighties, you were nobody unless you used an airbrush. One more example of bad judgement, thanks to the eighties.

 An airbrush is basically a small hand held spray gun. Because of this, if you want a clean edge on something, you have to cut a "frisket", which is more or less a sticky-backed stencil that you cut with an X-acto knife. Airbrushing without a frisket gives smokey appearance, and the overspray tends to bring out the paper texture in blank areas of the paper as the paint floats across the surface and is caught on the imperfections in the paper. Because the paint is being blown onto the surface, you don't really ever MIX colors when airbrushing. The colors can be speckled into each other with a light spray, but that's not the same as actually mixing. An airbrushed artwork tends to look foggy, speckly, and lacks detail. The best results are always achieved on smooth surfaces, like the side of a van. I say "best" as in "no paper grain or cotton fibers to catch the overspray". We see the best examples of execution and technique on vehicles, due to the durability of the surface and the sophistication of the paints available for automotive use. But why, why, WHY is the subject matter in these examples almost always that of  a petulant adolescent fantasy? People who want things painted on their cars tend to like what they like, and it usually stems from a masculinity complex.

It can be quick, however. Millions of hack artists have made money airbrushing T-shirts while you wait. You get what you pay for. Airbrushed T-shirts are almost always freehanded, without the use of friskets. So, you get the smokey overspray in the fibers of blank areas, just like on paper. For some reason, airbrush artists are preoccupied with painting evil clowns. If you get "good" at painting evil clowns on T-shirts, you can make a mint in any tourist trap, painting shirts for thirteen year old boys trying to look tough... or any gang banger wannabe trying to look like a thirteen year old boy. It's surprising (or not) to see how many professional airbrushists still have mullets.

Airbrush guys just looove to paint chrome. It's one of the few things that lends itself to a sprayed medium. Quite often, it's priority number one when Billy gets his airbrush kit. Once he sort of figures it out, he then begins to paint pretend album covers for his horrible junior high garage band. If he's lucky, he grows out of it by the age of twenty, or not.

So, yeah. Sanka. Dehydrated decaffeinated coffee. Sanka gives you both reasons not to drink coffee in one product, as well as all the reasons to hate airbrush. Here's a slogan for General Foods' Sanka division. "Sanka: Everything by negative example." You're welcome, Sanka.

Chox Hot Chocolate - Watch the tongue, kid.

Location: Beatrice food, 1948, October was just around the corner, and the weather in much of the country would be turning cooler. It was almost the high water mark for anyone in the heated-sugary-milk industry, and the Chox brand was ready to seize the lion's share of the market.

The executives had entertained proposals from the marketing department. The meeting and deliberation had taken a long time. The board room was filled with cigarette smoke, and the butts were an inch deep on the floor. It was 1948 after all. It was all worth it, because they had the perfect campaign lined up. It wasn't very innovative or clever, but these were not the things that drove the sweetened dehydrated lactic goop market. Tradition. Comfort. Familiarity.Warmth. This is how you got the mother's dollar in the fall.

The director tapped his pen on the desk, deep in thought. They'd need an adult female hand model, aged 30-35 and one boy. This boy had to have that Tom Sawyer "aw shucks" all American look. Definitely a plaid shirt. He'd have to look reeeeally happy about hot chocolate. Hmm. Flipping through headshots. He would be ordering lunch. This could take a while.

Wait. Who was that kid they used for the erector set ad in Boy's Life? The kid with so much energy they had to use high speed film just to keep him in focus? Kevin something. The director's finger stabbed the intercom. "Get me the talent agency. I got our boy!"

Zip pan to photo studio interior. Light is dim, apart from the set, consisting of a kitchen table and one chair. The perspective between the cup of chocolate and the kid meant that the shot would have to be comped later. The foreground elements would be shot separately from the boy so that they both could be in focus. The two shots needed different lenses. That was extra time of course, but the art department had a guy who was a wizard with the x-acto. They'd airbrush the steam in later, as usual.

They were getting the right energy from Kevin, but something was still not there. The kid's hair was a little messy, as if he had just climbed down from his tree house. They tested different angles for the kid's head and messed with the lighting. Eventually they  realized they needed a little backlighting so you could see the chair the boy was sitting in, until then, he looked like he was belly up to a bar or something. Closer, but still not right.

Then the photographer had it. "Yoo-hoo, Timmy or whatever, stick out your tongue, honey, like Wiley Coyote. Farther... more.... yes! Now move it to one side. No. Other side. Bingo! It was horrible, but the director knew it would sell. It was an utterly unntural gesture that no human had ever performed willingly. Mouth wide open in a huge grin. Tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth like he's, what? Licking his lips? Only cartoon characters did that. No boy had ever made that face, and he looked borderline insane. Insane for Chox hot chocolate. "That's lunch, everybody!"

Kelvinator - Hybrid Species

For a long time (I'm going to say 1950's -1960's), it was pretty fashionable to use photographs in print ads, but to "plus them up" with some airbrushing - either lightly or rather heavily. In this ad from Kelvinator we see a strange array of airbrushing, from mostly-photo-with-light-airbrushing, to completely cartoony.

The topmost picture is only lightly retouched, but if you look really closely at her face, her eyebrows are pretty seriously drawn in... like with a sharpie. The woman in the middle picture is a kind of middle ground, as if they started with a photo and then had the artist paint over her completely. Cute eyes though. At the bottom we see Wilma Flintstone a cartoon of a woman completely made up. She could have been drawn by Hanna-Barbera. When I look at her, I imagine her being voiced by June Foray.

Here's a perspective goof they missed. Look at the floor area of the bottom picture (even though there is no floor in it). The fridge's front and back feet are even with each other, as if the camera is lying on the floor. Now look at the woman's feet. The front foot is lower than the back foot, as if the camera is at waist height. The perspectives don't match. Maybe she's stepping down off a little footstool that wasn't painted in, along with the unpainted floor? This is a pretty minor fumble, but it makes me feel like a big man to point it out. There. Now I am a big man. That would explain the difference in floor height.

The tile in the top picture is very anachronistic. That tile may have been in fashion in 1961, the year this ad was published, but I associate that green-with-white-smears tile with basements and gas station bathrooms. Now that I picture this tile in my head, I also see it chipping away in spots, revealing salmon-colored tile underneath, with the chippy green crumbly bits sliding around under my feet as I wonder if I've just contracted dysintery from the sink.

Wait a second. Those aren't coffee pots in these pictures. They're hukka pipes! What goes on? Now I know the truth behind her smile. Look at her. That's a "please don't tell on me" smile. It looks like people really knew how to start the day right, back  in '61!