V-8: Stare into my can.....

Joke #1: Suzy knew that Timmy was right for the "club". He had no real friends, he loathed cooked meat, and he could not bear the touch of sunlight. One more rite of passage and he would be ready. She only needed to give him his first delicious, taste of salty, savory human blood.

Joke#2: V-8! Now with the goodness of eight blended vegetables, plus methamphetamine!

Joke#3: We've switched Timmy's Folger's Crystals with  Prestone all-season anti-freeze (now available in dex-cool formula). Let's see if he notices the difference!



Joke #4: We've switched Timmy's Prestone all-season anti-freeze with V-8 juice. Let's see if he can tell the difference!

Joke#5: It burned. Golly, it burned! Timmy mustn't make a face or Suzy would see it as a sign of weakness. Just a few more swallows and it would be over. He really wanted to be in the "club"... but V-8 sure was icky!

Westerm Auto Refrigerator - Primordial Photoshop

In 1957, if you wanted to "plus up" a product shot, you reached for your airbrush.... or you reached for your staff artist, who, in turn, reached for his (most likely "his") airbrush. This was back when "photo shop" meant "a shop where photographs are worked on".

First, you'd start by taking a picture of your product, and then having a print made in large format. You know... about the size of a canvas? The photo retoucher then went to work clarifying shadowy areas, adding contrast,  and generally highlighting the hell out of the product. Surfaces were made shinier. Areas of low contrast got dark outlines around objects.

Above, we see a refrigerator ad for Western Auto. I guess I'm not old enough to be familiar with the brand. But look at that fridge! Ignore the fact that the interior is molded in "intestinal pink", presumably to help you imagine how the food will look in your belly. It's been heavily airbrushed. So much so, that there is not discernible light source other than "sort of everywhere". The food products in the fridge look positively cartoony. The metal trim at the bottom has recieved the old "metal sheen" treatment.

The point was not to make it look more real. The point was to make it "ideal", which, depending on the disposition of your art director, may be "Disney style". My favorite part of this picture? The landscape outside the window. Rectangular marshmallow trees! Hooray! I want to go play outside in Picasso Grove after the photo shoot.

In case you don't like the pink interior, I'm sure the fridge was available in "avocado splatter" and "golden shower" to help you imagine your food exiting your body in various ways, if you're into that.

Baby Cot - Prepped for launch!

The year is 1960. The cold war is about as frosty as ever, and America goes about it's business, but just under the surface, everyone is holding their breath. When will the reds attack? Will we be ready? Will YOUR family be ready?
In the interest of national defense, our trusty British allies designed for us this tactical baby launcher. (Click on picture for larger, more readable version.) It could be cleverly deployed in the yard (or "garden" as the Brits call it) looking like any ordinary baby cot, looking for all the world like the cots the baby army slept on in their baby barracks.

But, should the Russians invade your nation, the baby cot could be quickly installed in a vehicle, making every family car a potential piece of baby-firing artillery. The proud parents would simply speed towards the target and slam on the brakes. The baby would then be launched through the windshield. Assming the baby had been primed with an explosive or incindiary charge, the enemy would in all likelihood snuff it... or be completely freaked out.

Unless, of course, the communists just chose to launch a missile at us. That would have made the tactical baby obsolete overnight. And sudden missile attack was what the whole cold war was really about the whole time anyway. Hmm. This whole "cold war" thing is more complicated than it seems.

Could it be that this baby launcher was invented just to be a baby cot? In that case WTF were you thinking, nineteen sixty? Look at it. It's positioned right between the front seat passengers so the baby wouldn't hit their heads on the way out. It couldn't be MORE of a baby launcher. Sometimes I can't believe our race has survived this long.

Chevy Delray - Back when "coupe" meant "beaucoup"

Joke #1: "Stevie! Hurry back! It's your turn to set the table once you and the dog are done out there."

Joke#2: "Honey, I gotta drive into town for some bread. Can you put down that box for a second and help me install the outboard motor?"

Joke#3: The other side of the Great Beverly Hillbillies House Swap.

Joke#4: Stevie had just forty minutes to hide himself in the wilderness before Daddy came after him with the Evinrude. The summer bloodsport sometimes felt like the only thing that kept the family together."

Joke#5: No more gangs. No more car alarms going off at all hours. No more stabbings. Judy was sure the family was going to love life in Berwyn.

Joke#6: "Honey, look how I'm holding the motor! Give you any ideas?"

Joke#7: The new Chevy Delray Coupe: Just enough car, when you only need to seat six, and carry a boat in the trunk.

'61 Corvair Van - Don't call it a wagon, and give me one.

In 1961, Popular Mechanics was excited to bring you previews of all the new car models in color. According to the magazine and a quick head count on my part, there were about thirty of them, and they were all domestics. No imported cars. It's not clear to me if that's because foreign cars were unavailable here, or nobody considered them as viable options. Heh, live it up, Detroit. You only have about 40 years until nobody wants your 6000SUX's anymore and you become a war zone.
But what's this? Oh, be still my foolish heart. What's your name? Corvair Wagon? Nonsense. You're a van! Don't call yourself a "wagon". Ssshh! No, don't talk. Just let me look at your row of happy windows and your wonderfully ridiculous white walls and your orange vinyl interior and your... gasp! Orange stripe! Such an orange stripe! I need to sit down. I must have you. You must come away with me, little Corvair Van. Come with me and we will drive to grocery stores and post offices and goodness knows what places we'll go together. You know what? I don't care where I go, so long as you're with me.

So it went, in the theater of my mind, when I set eyes on the Corvair "Wagon". I think vans should be blunt-nosed. The minivans of the 1990's  - well, ALL minivans - taught us that a van is ugly as a bowl of vomit when you try to slope the nose. It's like the van is ashamed of it's van-ness. A van is a shoe box. Let it be true to it's nature. This Corvair van looks like a birthday party on wheels. If I owned this thing and I had to go to a funeral, I'd need to rent something else to drive, because having this van in the funeral procession would be disrespectful, like wearing a clown suit. It's too happy.

Happy, that is, until it filps over on it's side. Long story short, the Corvair had an unfortunate rear suspension designed in such a way that, when you cornered, and the body leaned over towards the outside of the turn, the bottoms of the outside wheels ( the ones with all the weight on them) would tuck in under the car, making the car lean over even more. They could be very scary to drive. GM didn't fix the design problem until the 1964 model year.

This is a van version of the corvair car, so it's tall body gives it an ever crazier high center of gravity. This thing must have had an orange interior to help hide the blood from all the rollover accidents. You know what? I don't care. I still want one. Vans aren't meant to corner hard anyway, and if I do flip it over, my only concern would be, as they slide my broken body from under the Corvair, from blood-bubbing lips, "How's the stripe? (cough, choke) Did you save the stripe?"

Paul Anderson - Be the mighty tub of goo you always imagined.

Aah, the bodybuilding ad. They'll never become obsolete. Any magazine with an even slightly technical theme will have lots of ads selling muscle programs and boner pills. Try this: choose any TV show or printed publication and look at their ads, keeping a mental list as you go. This will give you a clear picture of who the producers / publishers think you are. It's hilarious and not a little insulting. Advertisements want to make you the person they think you're not.

Here we see an ad from the December 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. "Mech Ill" is great for crappy ads, because it's the poor man's Popular Mechanics. As a result, the advertisers are the bottom feeders who wouldn't pony up the dough to appear in the last 50 pages of "Pop Mech" (as we call it in the biz, which means "the business", which is what we call it when we're in the biz, which I'm not.)

Paul Anderson was the world's strongest man, as published in the Guiness Book of Unverifiable Claims and Irrational Declarations (ISBN 464415, extra sloppy 1957 edition with no big words). After his hernia in 1961, Anderson was then demoted by the Guinness organization to World's Most John Belushi-like Man, Whoever That Is, as John Belushi was alive at the time, but was only twelve, and wouldn't become a famous slob until the mid seventies.

So meanwhile, the world had Paul Anderson. He wrote a book showing you how to look like him. I don't think I'd need a whole book to tell you that:
1-Eat Until you're exhausted. 2-Rest. 3-Continue eating. 4-Repeat until death.

Conversely, the steps to becoming trim and healthy are as follows: 1-Eat fewer calories. 2-Eat better food. 3-Do something physically difficult for a while a few times a week. Anyone not trying to sell you a book (or duped by someone selling them a book) will tell you the same thing. You're welcome. The part that fills up a book is the part about convincing yourself to keep doing these things.

Many big people have muscles of steel beneath all that extra weight. Carrying around an extra 80 pounds all day would tend to make one kind of strong. Many big people are perfectly healthy, so long as they look after their heart and blood pressure, etc. What makes Anderson so easy to laugh at is that he's holding himself up as a model for other men. He may have a lot of muscle, but he's got at least as much fat, too.

Mr. Anderson probably wrote the copy in his ad all by himself. Does it look like he hired an editor? "BIG BOOK FREE - WRITE TODAY". You see what he's done there? He's explained that A) There is a book, and B) the book is big. Therefore C) you should write today to get a copy. Bulletproof logic like that could easily be "BIG CAKE GOOD - EAT NOW!", and by the looks of him, this is a philosophy vigorously embrached by Anderson. Hell, if the book were full of deft syllogisms like that, you're damn right I'd buy it!

Riverview Flying Cars - No injuries... yet.

A lot of my friends' parents talk with moist-eyed happiness about Riverview Park, a Chicago amusement park that existed from 1904 to 1967. Life ran this page about the Flying Cars ride in 1957. The safety precautions of the time are slightly hilarious.

Click on the picture for a high resolution version you can read for yourself. The ride worked like this: the drum was motorized and the cars were freewheeling, held onto the drum by a flanged rail and floating clamp system. The drum rotates up to speed and the cars let it roll beneath their wheels. Then, the cars' brakes are applied, quickly accelerating up to the 30mph speed of the drum's surface. Patrons spin around the drum for two minutes before the brakes are released, letting the cars wobble to a standstill while the drum also slows to a halt.

Looking at the thing, I'm amazed that no one was hurt (according to the article, which is according to the park, which is not likely to publicize any injuries). The patrons are asked to keep their hands inside, just like any roller coaster, but look how easily some idiot could reach down and grab the car's wheel. The people are "tightly strapped in" by one belt across their stomachs. Their heads are free to flop around well above the body of the car, enjoying zero neck supprt. When the brakes are engaged and the cars accelerate, what happens to your neck? Maybe it's a trick of perspective, but it looks like those waiting in line seem really close to the machine itself.

These are not complaints. I'm in favor of people with poor judgement being allowed to horribly mutilate themselves in public for the greater good. It's just that, from the perspective of a person used to having a yellow padded horse collar drop down over my head whenever I got on the Shockwave, the Flying Cars ride looks really... what's the word?... "homebrewed", like something a guy would build next to his doublewide, without any oversight or forethought. It not only looks homebrewed, but also "home-investigated-by the-local-authorities", "home-subpoena'd", and "home-subsequently-serving-time-at-a-state-run-facility'd."