It’s been a year since Playboy gutted almost everything I liked about it, presumably to cut costs and share display/iPad space with Maxim and such. My online subscription lapsed after three issues and I’ve left the country, so popping over to the newsstand out of curiosity really isn’t an option.
Has it gotten any better? Have they reinstated the cartoons, at least?
When Playboy abruptly changed, it’s as if they sucked all the fin out of it.
I don’t mean just the nudes (although it’s weird that Maxim, or even Newsweek, had women wearing fewer clothes than Playboy at that point) – they took out just about everything that made the magazine fun to read. The cartoons were gone, an awful lot of the “front” material (the “trends” and “datasheet” (not the one on the centerfold – the statistics page near the beginning) and the political commentary), the Playboy Party Jokes (OK, that one didn’t bother me, I have to admit) and the COLOR – the magazine was suddenly a collection of somber tones of brown and gray, with all bright colors missing (except for the paid advertisements).
Playboy has recovered somewhat. There is one – one! – cartoon per issue. The color has come back, a little bit. They run an occasional humorous or The State of Sex article in the spirit of the old Playboy. The women are allowed to be a little more naked (you can see entire gluteal sulci* again). The mag never did give up on the Interview and well-written fiction and its “living the good life” features. You can read it without a problem on an airline or in a waiting room. But, heck, Cosmopolitan is sexier and more colorful these days.
*“buttcrack” to many people. I can’t stand the word. It sounds like something with ragged edges that are inflamed and hurt.
ONE CARTOON PER ISSUE? Jesus, I had no idea they’d done that.
That’s some serious shit. After THE NEW YORKER, PLAYBOY was always the most important venue for contemporary cartoon art.
Who remembers Gahan Wilson cartoons ftw?
Gahan is still around! May be retired, though…haven’t seen any of his work for the past year or two.
Wrong direction: The buttcrack separates the cheeks vertically, the gluteal sulcus is the horizontal crease which separates the bottoms of the buttocks from the tops of the rear upper thighs.
It’s allowable, sincve it’s a sulcus ion the gluteus maximus.
But if you wanna be unambiguous, it’s intergluteal cleft
…and now they realizxed what a mistake they made.
They’re bringing back not just the nudity, but some of the old features:
Playboy Takes Its Identity Back, Puts Nudity In New Issue | HuffPost Entertainment?
I could do without the Party Jokes – I’d just like them to bring back the cartoons. And the COLOR. The magazine has been a damned somber parade of earth tones for the past year.
Our long national nightmare is over.
Its nice to see the breast of America returning to the newsstands.
Somber earth tones? That sounds like “Worklad.”
Can we blame this strange turn from Playboy for the GOP majority in Congress? Or North Korean missile tests? No? Well, I may anyway.
I realize you’re joking but really the only reason is the bottom line, cash, mazoolah, spondulicks. People didn’t want to buy Playboy without nudes. And why should they? Despite the oft-heard mantra in its heyday “I buy it for its really good articles” everyone knew that was BS. For most purchasers it was a glorified strokebook with classier broads.
Personally I’m pleased that the tits and asses are back. I’m a little past strokebooks myself but I remember my youth and these magazines really do serve a noble purpose. Young men, old men too at times, need to masturbate, it’s healthy. Women too but I have no idea what visual aids they use.
Removing the nudes was a totally dumb move and we should all welcome their return.
IIRC the original move to merely cheesecakey content followed on the heels of how the sanitizing of their website had resulted in a huge boom in visits – but maybe that was not so much about finding a new audience who prefers their web exerience uninterrupted by tits, as due to it no longer being on the wrong side of nannyware. (Old Hef was apparently fine with it… maybe because he was thinking sales first? maybe because because at this point he says my job is done here, maybe I AM too old for this?)
So are we to assume Coop has looked at the figures and said, “Um, people? This is not giving us the sort of kick on the bottom line that merits having done a New Coke on the brand”?
The magazine even *before *last year was but a shadow of what it was in the 60s/70s, not really knowing what market it was going after in this day and age. It would be unreasonable to expect a return to that point, but still one can see a position of “our brand was built on tasteful nudes and good text content; how about we try that” coming from someone with an interest in keeping the legacy going.
Just out of curiosity I downloaded it: if this is supposed to be the “back to normal” issue, they’re still rather squeamish about nudity. No visible full frontal in any of their pictorials, nudity level no higher than you might expect from page 3 a British tabloid
I haven’t seen the newest issue yet on the stands, but, as I say, what bugged me was the lack of color and humor, more than the nudes. And even without the nudity, Playboy seemed obsessed by it. For the first few issues they went out of their way to make sure there wasn’t even any butt cleavage – there were strategically placed towels and the like. They were showing ostentatiously not-nude women.
I always thought it was a move to get their magazine into places like waiting rooms and airlines and the like.
**CalMeacham **yes that was what I perceived too.
So it would be a reset back to their early-60s mode, then. They seem to be carefully testing for what will be “enough”.
What was good about Playboy’s writing?
Am I correct that Playboy was successful by combining somewhat shocking sexual appeal with some sophistication/non-crassness?
What could be today’s equivalent of the somewhat shocking sexual appeal it used in the past now that GQ and Cosmopolitan are about equally sexed up?
Playboy paid top dollar for its writing, and was a much sought-after venue. There was a lot of good fiction, not to mention good political commentary and general nonfiction articles published in its pages over the years. There was also a lot of popular stuff that fits its image that wasn’t of the highest literary caliber, but at least it was fun.
So, over the years, it published Isaac Asimov, Arthir C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury Robert Sheckley and other science fiction writers (Hef was a sciFi geek), William F. Buckley, Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and many other noted writers. It also serialized Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun (Playboy and the James Bond franchise had a symbiotic relationship) It published abbreviated versions of Nicholas Meyers Sherlock Holmes pastiche The West End Horror and William Hjortsberg’s pulpish Falling Angel (which became the movie Angel Heart. The iconic science fiction stories The Fly (by William Langelland, filmed twice and spawning three sequels) and A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury (which has been endlessly referred to and parodied) first appeared in its pages.
“I only read it for the articles” is a well-worn cliché, but the fact is, there was a lot worth reading in its pages. Plus all those great cartoons by Gahan Wilson, B. Kliban, Robert Coles, and others.
“A Sound of Thunder” was published in Colliers. Maybe Hef got sloppy seconds.
And the interviews of political and artistic figures were also top notch quality, sometimes rather edgy or exactly timely (Miles Davis, Dr. King AND Mamcolm X, Stanley Kubrick, Ayn Rand, Lennon/Ono just before his slaying, Jimmy Carter’s lust in his heart in the middle of the campaign, the whole Sandinista leadership while we were fighting them).