Pazo Hemorrhoid Cream - Butt hunting.

"Yaaawwwn. Well, another Monday morning as an editor at a small-ish advertising firm in 1960. I sure had a nice time at that cocktail party on Satrurday, talking to that nice couple from across the street about how words placed next to pictures create an association in the mind of the observer. Fascinating stuff. Ah well, what's first for today?"

"Oh yeah, I left this hemorrhoid project half finished on Friday. Sigh. No picture. What to do? These guys from Pazo don't have much to spend on art. Preparation H has been eating their lunch. Pazo is hoping to get a foothold in the midwest with this campaign, but jeez, you gotta spend money to make money."

"Hmm. What've we got lying around? Umm. This stack of airplane pictures from that democratic rally at the airport last month. No connection there. Oh hey! We just got that book of old woodcuts of sportsmen! Where did I leave that? *Click* Jane? Do you remember where we put that book of old woodcuts? The one Troy picked up in Philly? You know, from that stock images company? Yeah, thanks, doll. I need a quick finish on the Pazo piece for no money. That's the one. You're a treat, Jane. *Click*."

"Let's see. Race drivers.... nah. Jockeys... nope. Cyclists... no. Come on. I just need something that says "My ass neither hurts nor itches." Pilots... nope. Bobsled guys... naw. Oh hey! A hunter! He's perfect! Look at him, all tweedy and proud, with his knees bent in an alert crouch like he could happily sit down at any moment.  He looks he could wipe all day without discomfort! Fudd, you're going in!"

*Click* "Jane? Can you contact the guys who made this book and see if we can work out a deal to use a picture in exchange for six hundred tubes of Pazo hemorrhoid cream? We gotta get rid of these stupid samples, and the budget on this job is dry as a bone. Lemme know how it goes babe. If we can't use this hunter, I'll be having my damn kid draw something for this ad. *Click*. Stupid cheapskates. What time is it? Hey ten-thirty! Time for drinks!"

*Click* Jane? I'm beat. I'm taking an early lunch. Look, if the stock art guys bite on this hunter picture. Ship out this box of butt cream to them  pronto and have an intern do the paste-up for the ad. Have someone come up with some copy that helps explain the picture. Something about enjoying sports. Get the intern to do it. I'm sick of thinking about it. Thanks, babe.

"Aaah. Some days I really feel like I earn my eighteen grand a year in 1960 dollars. I love being an ad guy."

END

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.

Marfak - Non-removable goop!

My dad had the knowin' and the doin' of a lot of things, and maybe ten percent of that knowledge was passed on to me. Some was simply beyond my grasp and would require some time at a trade school to really pick up. His garage was full of solvents and goops of various smells and usefulnesses. I've never heard of Marfak the lubricant. He was the villain in Krull (not really).

Texaco is pretty proud of Marfak's stickiness and lubricity. The station manager is pretty proud of his hose. Engage jokes, number one!

Joke #1 - "Yeah, the new guy got pretty excited earlier. Gil's a good kid. Lots of energy. Just a little jumpy. Let me finish cleaning this off and I'll be right with you."

Joke #2 - "I dunno. I saw these guys on Discovery channel last night who were cutting metal with a water jet. I've been at it all morning and all I've got is this rusty spot."

Joke #3 - "And this is what'll happen to you if you run off without paying for gas, sir. Scared straight, huh? I'll spray you so wet your kids will be born damp. Well, more so than they're supposed to be. You know what I mean. Just pay for the gas, okay? Send that lady over here on your way back to your car. She looks like a gas stealer too."

Joke #4 - "I'll be with you in a second, sir. I've got some Marfak on my board, here. This hose just isn't doing it. Guess I'll have to drive my board a thousand miles if I want it clean. Gosh darn Marfak. It's gonna be a long day."

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.

Rocket Station 1949 - Cavescience.

The Phil Are Go! archaeology squad recently unearthed this image of a proposed "rocket launching station" from deep within a magazine. Judging by the number of strata to be removed (83), researchers were able to determine the page of the image. It was on page 84. Working in semi-sterile conditions, layers of boring and unfunny geekdom were removed from the area above page 84, and the image was painstakingly scanned using the P.A.G. Hundred Dollar Scanner (HDS). The image had to be absolutely straight or history would be mad. So, they used a ruler. The button was archaeologically pressed with tweezers. History came alive.

Most telling is the size of the image. It appears in the magazine at about the same scale as a Bazooka Joe comic. This implies that the artist was ashamed of his blasphemy, perhaps fearing reprisal from the religious leaders of the time. Perhaps the artist intended for his drawing to be sold in bubble gum packets, where his notions of space exploration would be safely dismissed as childish fantasy, or collected and mailed away in great numbers in exchange for a novelty palm buzzer.

This image proves beyond a doubt that humans in the 1949th century knew about space, as well as drawing things. Previously, our understanding of 1949 imaging techniques involved spitting paint over an outstretched hand, as in the caves of Altamira. But, it cannot be denied that primitive 1949 humans had a basic understanding of different shapes. The rocket is all coney and the building is kind of squarey. Notice that the artist pointed the rocket up into the air, indicating that he or she knew where space was. This is impressive, considering the fact that automobile designers of the general era were still obsessed with putting boobs on cars.

The artist's understanding of the principles of space travel continued to impress the staff. The bottom of the rocket is carefully housed in a trapezoidal building. Presumably, this is intended to retain the precious heat from the mighty blast of the booster engines, indicating that this very first rocket station was probably intended to be built somewhere cold, like moon, or at the bottom of the ocean.

In keeping with our understanding of primitive man's fear of fire, the designer included a kind of chimney thing, seen to the left of the rocket building, to make the fire go away into the air, where it would punish their gods for making gravity so frustratingly strong. It is not clear what the artist intended to be used as fuel for the big space rocket. Probably human feces, or communists. The artist also had the foresight to poke some holes in the building, so that people inside could see outside without opening the door, risking a serious cold or drowning (see above). Also, there's a pretty neat choo choo train.

Stopette - Zap. You don't smell.

In 1951, lasers were a young science, which makes it all the more surprising that the Jules Monteneir company developed, in that year, the first deodorant applied by laser.

Initially, it seemed like the most obvious application of the technology, since a lasing medium can be created in a number of ways, including by gas and chemical means. It seemed to the researchers at Jules Monteneir that it would be simple to use part of the chemical ingredients in the deodorant product as a gain medium. Then, by means of a small pump laser and it's power supply, carried in an easily portable wagon connected by a thin umbilicus of cables and hoses, the light was channeled through a surprisingly clever (for the time) miniaturized combined optical cavity and beam splitter, housed in the nozzle of the plastic bottle.

Like modern color laser printers, the deodorant product was applied like toner, and due to the accuracy of the lasers, reproducability of an exact underarm spray pattern was nearly flawless from morning to morning... so long as the user mounted the bottle gently in a small bench vise.

However, accidents occurred due to customer error. Many women preferred to hold the bottle in their hand like ordinary deodorant. This upset the delicate components in the mechanism. The lasing medium  could become contaminated by deuterium gas from the deodorant product, creating a deuterium fluoride laser, instead of the intended - and safer - hydrogen fluoride laser. Injuries ranged from second degree dermal burns to accidental amputation.

The landmark case of Rogers vs. Jules Monteneir brought a sudden end to the company's dream of laser-applied cosmetics. In the accident, a customer lost her right arm and brought down a Cessna 190 airplane before emergency crews could get her deodorant to shut off. The resulting settlement brought a string of similar lawsuits, and the company folded in the fall of 1952 under the financial burned of the legal fees.

The remaining stock of Stopette deodorant was sold off to private laboratories as well as the U.S. Navy, where the deodorant applicators were slightly detuned and found new life stripping paint from warships. One such ship was the USS Juneau, which was instrumental in a few of the naval battles during the Korean war, including the sinking of a North Korean ammunition ship at Inchon. One of the crew was quoted as joking "Poof! There goes ammunition!"

The cosmetics industry learned a lesson from the failure of Stopette laser-applied products, and to this day, high energy cosmetics science courses at major universities still suffer low enrollment.

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