Gillette Blades - They can make the pain stop.

Shaving news now, from 1937, brought to you by a terrifying, razor sharp mascot who looks like he's more than ready to open an artery for you!

"Ouch! The wind has made my skin so blamed tender, I can hardly shave!" You've been there, right? Skin is sore and red. All you want is a little relief. Then there's that one blade that pops up out of the dispenser and starts talking to you. Those big, staring doll eyes. The words that hold such promise of release from pain... from everything. It would be so simple. So easy. You would hardly feel a thing. And then, the sweet bliss of peace.

The eyes are full of answers. The answer. Somehow, those eyes - all at once so disturbing yet reassuring - tell you they want to be close to your skin, with the warm, pulsating vein so close below. He's so cold. Won't you help him warm up? So very close. He can almost see your blood. Almost taste it. Just, almost. So... easy.

Please enjoy the horrifying mascot from today's Gillette ad. You won't want to go anywhere without him, would you? He'd be so cold, without your warm, yielding skin to keep him warm. Print him out and carry him everywhere. Yeeessss, that's it. You're welcome!

Borden Starlac - Not necessarily for use in blancmange.

It's been a while since we heard from the unsettling mascots of Borden, Inc., but here they are in 1957, at the height of their creepy doll glory. And, better still, they're trying to sell you a renamed powdered milk: "Starlac".

In case, you're not old enough to have experienced the horror of powdered milk, first, thank your lucky stars. Second, go find your parents and thank them for never resorting to such measures as powdered milk in the lean times your family may have had. If you're powdered-milk-curious, go ahead and read this. Times can be rough when raising a family, of course, but I submit that powdered milk is a bigger waste of money than normal milk, because you'll never get to the bottom of a pitcher of powdered milk. Also, can you ever imagine saying "We shouldn't have wasted that money buying liquid milk."?

Anyway, the Borden monstrosities in this ad are, for some reason, going with a movie projector theme. First up on the big screen tonight - some words trying to make powdered milk seem less than disgusting. Dad cow (I've just been informed that's "Elmer the Cow".) is previewing the second reel. What could that be? News reels of  war atrocities inappropriately accompanied by calliope music? It could be no less wholesome than powdered milk propaganda.

From the planet Skyron, not Starlac.

The recipe in this ad is "Starlac Crown Dessert". I have to admit, it looks okay. Pink, yellow, and white are usually pretty safe cakey-desserty colors, and you can't go far wrong with those. This is basically a casting of chilled sugar goop. No cakey stuff to be found. That sounds a lot like a Blancmange, which famously tried to destroy humanity by winning Wimbledon in 1969. Could it be a coincidence that this powdered milk has a spacey name like Starlac? Of course. Don't be stupid.

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1961 Rambler American - Red Dead with Engine.

Here's another Rambler you can't buy any more, because the brand is dead. However  you can always go to Ebay, where the current bid price for a squeaky clean white '61 convertible is around $8,000 (reserve not met yet). I don't know why, but the stubby looks of compact cars from the Sixties looks better than the smeary, stretchy lines of current compacts.

Of course, if the roads were filled with cars that looked like this Rambler, I'm sure I'd pine for the day when I could look at swoopy little cars with pointy headlights. The grass is always greener.

Check out this honky lollipop mascot they have here. He's about as square as you can get, not that you'd notice in '61. Lawrence Welk could still be found on the Billboard Hot 100 list for February 1961 (the month this ad ran in LIFE).
















Here's the Lawrence Welk orchestra rocking out with Calcutta, the hit that had Welk on the charts that month. What does it say about me that I both know and like the song? Well, It means it appears on one of my Ultralounge CDs and it makes me laugh. Any song that has a chorus going "la la la la" gets my vote for sheer courage, even in '61. I still insist I'm cooler than Lollipop Rambler Honky Man. I do have a few Zeppelin albums.



Two more things: A) Apart from the clapping at 1:45, they don't seem to be dancing to any particular song, let alone the one the orchestra is playing. B) Since when was the Lawrence Welk show shot in a gymnasium?

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Hastings Piston Rings - Ring around the muzzle.

Aah, nineteen sixty-two. Everything was cool looking and mod. Cars were evolving from childish to elegant. Clothes were trim and sleek. Character design had reached maturity. (Please purchase a turntable and a sacrificial record so you can drag the tonearm across the disc. Do that now.) Then there's the Hastings man.

What the eff? What's with this guy's face? Apart from his catastrophically deviated septum and his mysterious twin neck nipples / melanomas, the real trouble starts below his nose.


This is the part of a cartoon character's face that some cartoonists call the "muzzle". This term bugs me, because "muzzle" should only apply to dogs and perhaps doglike animals, and Elton John (who my art professor used to insist was very doglike in the way he looked and sang). But, there's no better word to quickly point your attention to the region around the mouth and jaw. Anyway, the Hastings man's face is a mess, and this cannot be attributed to any "style of the times".  Character design in 1962 was more like the tailored-for-cheap animation look of the Hanna Barbera cartoons, which means "simple and clean". There's no stylistic excuse for Hastings Man. He's just a shitty drawing.

Fred Flintstone's face had a muzzle. It's the shaded area where his permanent five o'clock shadow turns his skin a different color around his mouth. Also see Homer Simpson. Despite their position in the bargain-basement TV animation market, Hanna Barbera did know the basics of character design. You have to, if you're hoping to animate your character efficiently and on time. Notice how Fred's muzzle has just the one line around it. Now look at Hastings man's multiple concentric muzzles.


What kind of life has Hastings man led to earn a face so wrinkled and tortured? Did he serve in WWII or Korea? Did he ever get to sleep indoors or did he sleep on the surface of the sun, soaking up those sweet, face-melting UV rays? We can only guess, because he's not talking... not with a dainty little mouth like that. That mouth is only good for making little mewling sounds and eating soba noodles.

I have only ever made one immutably true observation about the human condition that, to my knowledge, hadn't been made before. "There is nothing too stupid to become popular." Witness those spinny ghetto wheel covers and the entire career of Michael Bay. In the case of Hastings Man, I feel like we somehow dodged a bullet. We could have been living with characters with pointless concentric mouth lines for over forty years now, but The Sixties thankfully self-corrected this character to the sidelines of advertising forever.  Thank you, The Sixties. Hastings Man is nowhere to be found on the Hastings corporate web site, apart from the "our history" page. Good job there. We must never forget Hastings man. lest we be doomed to repeat the atrocity.

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Dormeyer Coffe Pot - Bean's chosen demise.

Advertising tends to stop working on you the more you think. Worse than thinking is asking questions. Questions are the kryptonite of the ad man. Do not ask questions. Just consume. This 1960 ad for Dormeyer small appliances is a harmless but classic example of the baffling proposals that ad men would like us to accept.

The mascot is a coffee bean, drinking a cup of coffee while explaining to us his dream of being roasted, crushed, boiled, drained, and drunk by humans. If the observer can accept the idea of an anthropomorphic bean, he or she should feel a certain sense of horror that this bean has such masochistic fantasies, not to mention cannibalistic habits. A creature this weird deserves a painful death in a lovely Silver-Smith aluminum chamber of doom.

Silver-Smith aluminum? Wait, what? I hope they're only using the word "silver" to describe the color of the metal. Otherwise, we have no choice but to conclude that Dormeyer's advertising company has nothing but contempt for the meaning of words.

Anyway, back to the dream of Bean Guy. In a past life, I worked at a place that animated some commercials. One of the spots we worked on was for Starkist Tuna. You know - the ones with Charlie the Tuna in them? Even as I drew stacks of drawings of Charlie, I couldn't help but be confused as to why his dream was to be killed, ground into pulp and eaten by humans. If he were to explain this to me, my reaction to Charlie would start with pity, but would turn to revulsion and, ultimately, the desire to help him achieve his goal, just to make him go away and stop creeping me out. It's easy to hate Charlie the Tuna. Ostensibly, it was a badge of honor to be selected by Starkist for such a fate. I refuse to believe that the fishes in the cans are enthusiastic about being there.

The design of the bean man is kind of horrible Too. the cleft in a coffee bean looks a lot like a butt... or something even more vulgar. Let the images come to you in time. You'll regret it. It looks like the guy started as a fabricated puppet of some kind. Look at his hand. It's a little fabric glove with wires inside to hold the pose. Strange. The red spot color makes it hard to tell what's what, but it looks like the hat, cup, face, and sash are all comped in later by an artist. That's an awful lot of work to breathe life into a misguided abomination like this Bean Guy.

Why not make the mascot a coffee pot, or a long-haul trucker, or a medical student studying for finals? These make more sense than a bean getting a pick-me-up by drinking himself. I think I know why. It's the ad man's fundamental contempt for all living things, real or imagined.

AC Oil Filters - Equal opportunity employer.

Here's a full-page ad for AC oil filters featuring a beautiful painting which shows how much oil flows through your oil filter. "A bargeload of oil" every 5000 miles. Trouble is, I doubt this statistic had much impact on the average driver. That's as may be, but look at those darling differently-abled mascots!

Awwww, they can hardly hold their heads up, they're so semi-concussed! Look at those vacant eyes and those lolling tongues! It's all I can do to keep from putting them out of their adorable misery.

It's hard to guess why the AC division of General Motors would choose basset hounds as their spokesbeasts for oil filters. Even at their best, basset hounds look really dopey and out of it. These three look like they're coming down off a three-day morphine-and-tilt-a-whirl bender. They look sad and mournful, as if they personally knew the dinosaurs that time has liquefied and will soon be squozen through the pores of the very filters they now promote. It seems GM was simply doing them a favor.

Whether they're are suffering from head injuries or chemical addiction, it's heartwarming to see General Motors helping these disadvantaged cartoon animals find work. How many jobs can there be for imaginary basset hounds with Ozzy Osbourne levels of confusion and helplessness? Thank you, GM, for making a difference.

Borden - Yikes, dollface!

When we last saw the Borden anthropomorphic cow family, they were only a painting - a terrifying vision of gene-splicing gone hideously wrong. In this ad, they're freaky little dolls, hoping to tempt you into eating some food made from juices squozen from their very bodies. Brace yourself.

Because I'm a genius, I didn't put a date on the previous Borden post, so I don't know what year it was published, but I seem to remember it being from 1951 or so. This one is from 1957, and I want to believe that Borden switched to dimensional characters because of overwhelming negative feedback on their painted characters, who all looked like they had masses of loose skin due to their recent gastric bypass surgery. That would make sense, since the Cow family apparently take great delight in eating rich foods made from their own bodily fluids.

These are clearly dolls. Borden seems to have abandoned the effort to paint lovable humanoid cows. Well done. These new dimensional versions seem to have had some retouching on their faces, just to "plus them up" as they say in the ad biz. They look like zombies. The retouching is most evident on Mom Cow. Click the full picture above to see her at high resolution. Dad cow, pictured at left, is simply the most terrifying of the three. He looks like he's craving delicious brains, made only with Borden's wholesome dairy products, of course.

I've always been unsettled and confused by the practice of making up a mascot for your food corporation whose products are made from the mascot. For example, Charlie the Tuna craves nothing so much as to be killed, ground into a pulp, packed in a can, and eaten by humans. When I look at Mother Cow holding the cake, it's hard not to imagine her back in the kitchen making the cake, squatting over the bowl, squeezing her dugs directly into the batter for the freshest cake possible. Bleah. Thankfully, this doesn't interfere with my love of milk. I just try not to think about what it took to bring it to my table. Even if I do imagine the goings on at a dairy farm, it's only "a little weird". By contrast, I find the idea of a sentient, part-human cow-woman milking herself for the Borden company absolutely disgusting. What I've learned is this: advertising simply ceases to work once you start thinking anything through.

Know what, though? That cake looks really really good. I wish it didn't.

Squirt - Good Staff Artists

I don't know if Squirt used staff artists or... actually, I'm pretty sure they just hired an advertising company who used THEIR own staff artists for this ad. Doesn't matter. There is brilliant work in here.
1954 was still the middle of the golden age of advertising mascots. Also, it was the golden age of advertising, in this irrelevant nobody's opinion. You know... post-war optimism and a healthy economy make for some upbeat, irrationally happy ads.

This ad features two very different kinds of mascot art: abstract minimalism and disney-style. The one at the top, with the inverted black/white colors is a beautiful example of the abstract drawing style from the 50's. He's got no hands or feet and his head is a teardrop. If you click on the close-up of him below, you can see that the line around his head is kind of chalky. I can't explain why that's cool, but it is.

The other mascot, down below, is squirt boy. It shouldn't be impressive, but he was actually drawn by someone who knows how to draw cartoon characters! Take a walk down the cereal aisle of your grocery store and you'll see monstrous examples of badly-drawn over-rendered characters. Too many lines, wonky posing, clueless line tapering, and lumpy, bulbous designs are par for the course. Squirt boy looks good! Of course, this isn't too surprising, since advertising artists were, as a rule, trained in illustration back then. Now, they're mostly technicians and it shows.

At the bottom is a great black and white painting of a happy fisherman enjoying some squirt. Ignoring all common sense that sugar water is terrible for quenching thirst (a fact that soda companies still choose to ignore to this day), I cna only guess that the man is included as a serving suggestion for the type of face you might choose to make while you're enjoying your own glass of Squirt. Also, there's a great, cheesy spot color added, just for some zazz.