Since I had extra time at the MD’s, I decided to rot my brain and try the magazines.
I could not believe my eyes - a real, live “Boy’s Life” - official publication of Boy Scouts of America.
Along with (nearly) every story now in comic-book format, we still are telling young boys that their future will include - wait for it:
Flying Cars - and these don’t need any form of lift-producing OR motive parts!
They will use tiny turbines powered by solar electricity!
Aside from that, it is still written for 8 year olds, but can’t even do a lame “How do you make…” joke without a comic strip presentation.
I didn’t see an ads for Daisy Brand Air Rifles or even the brand of .22 LR which turns you into a heroic sharpshooter (remember the kid nailing a rattler right through its mouth!, thereby saving the grizzled old prospector the snake had pinned against a boulder)?
Hell, not even X-ray glasses (OK, so the BSA never had the guts to carry the good ads).
Of course we’re still telling them they’ll get flying cars. There’s something about flying cars that just makes sense; cars = cool, flying = cool, therefore car + flying = double cool! In 500 years when everyone’s consciousness has been uploaded to the cloud and physical bodies are a thing of the past, we’re still going to be promising kids bright red flying cars.
I don’t know what they have today, but when I was a kid in the 80s, Boys’ Life had ads for a 100,000 volt stun baton. :eek: I, of course, was shocked and appalled that they would advertise such things to children — and then, I said, “Mom, can I borrow some money? I want to buy something from Boys’ Life.”
There was another standard, more younger kids, magazine — name escapes me — that every doctor and dentist had with a lot of corny morals lessons and stuff. “Highlights” maybe? I saw a copy like 10 years back and was shocked. Didn’t have the chance but I wanted to check the date to see if it had been sitting there since the 60s.
Of course I do! And I still want a Savage Model 24, .22 on top and .410 under, though the modern Model 42 would probably look small on me. Still, great for an indecisive kid.
Highlights for Children, I suppose, although I remember it more for its games (probably matching words to pictures, or simple rebuses, though I don’t really remember). Or maybe it just had something for everyone.
I guess I got a free trial subscription to Boys’ Life when I was a Cub Scout, mid 1970’s. I remember a couple of cartoon features, “Tracy Twins”, about a couple of Cub Scouts who did goody-goody things, such as calling people up to remind them to vote, and “Peewee Harris”, a Boy Scout, who did slightly cooler things. Then there was “Boy Scouts in Action”, real-life illustrated stories of Scouts doing heroic things.
There was also a chess column by Larry Evans, who was several times US champ. I remember a silly game that ran in the column, among 50 apparently submitted by a subscriber, I assume, for Evans’ approval:
Boy’s Life Reader–Mystery Man
e4 c5
Nf3 e6
d4 cd
Nd4 Nf6
Nc3 g6
Bg5 Qa5 (“an awful mistake which loses a piece and the game”–BLR )
Bf6 Rg8
Bc4 (“the win is now just a matter of technique”–BLR, but also a famous chess cliché)
8… e5
Nb3 Qb6
Be5 Nc6
Nd5 Qd8
Nf6+ Ke7 (“12…Qf6 13. Bf6 is also hopeless in the long run”–BLR)
Qd6 mate.
Then there was a cover story, for instance, one about Bert Jones, NFL quarterback. I don’t remember the ads, or maybe they just run together with the comic ads I recall.
When I was in junior high, I used to read Boy’s Life whenever I went to the school library, which was often.
A few years after that, National Lampoon published a parody issue called Boy’s Real Life. It had articles on things like how to play frog baseball, how to start smoking, and how to compute the correct trajectory for dropping rocks on cars from overpasses. It also had a humor page filled with every dirty joke you heard in sixth grade, told exactly the way a sixth-grader would tell them.
Here’s the cover of the parody. I’m willing to guess you’ll stare at it for a minute or two before you realize what’s so funny about it:
Boy’s Life is funded as much by Scout dues as by advertising; I don’t recall ever seeing it for sale on a newsstand, and I got it free and unasked-for when I was in the Scouts. Things that are divorced from market forces tend to hang around for a good while.
Junior Barbarian has been a subscriber for about five years (and never a Scout); at going-on-15 I think he’s ready to let the subscription run out. We’ve had many interesting… encounters over each new issue. He often would come downstairs, chortling, to read us the jokes page, which as far as I can tell is simply recycled on about a 5-year rotation. He would get disappointed that I knew the punchline to most of the ancient riddles and puns (I learned to go easy on it; he was entitle to the same fun I had at 12 with those stinkers). He got kind of intrigued when I could remember earlier iterations of nearly all the jokes, articles, topics etc. - both from my days and from a much older stepbrother’s time with it, in the early 1980s.
I guess I’m torn between mild exasperation and mild admiration for its ability to keep recycling itself, much like Highlights or Maxim or any of a hundred cooking, homemaking and women’s magazines.
Sorry, was meant to be a snarky bit of humor. I guessed the gist of the illustration before I clicked on the link. It’s a hilarious parody, especially the headlines in the panel. All just too true to not have a little pain in the laugh.
