Playboy is taking a break for the whole virus thing. Give the world of print media, nobody expects it to ever come back.
Still, I bet the brand is worth a bundle with is vast library and of course the air freshener market.
They were sort of on the wrong foot in terms of women’s rights, saying women ought to just accept that men are pigs. On the other hand, they also encouraged women to fully participate in the world on their own, not as an adjunct to a man.
I have to admit this news is just a little sad.
I’m gonna miss the articles
In what way? Because they appreciate the beauty of a woman’s body?
I always thought the brand, with the bunny logo and everything, could have been worth a lot, had it been managed properly. They could have emphasized the sophistication that Hef tried to bring to it earlier, with the whole cocktail culture and all that. I mean, look at chains like Hooters or Hard Rock Cafe or one of the casino brands. That could have been the Playboy brand.
Realistically, with today’s technology, you don’t have to go down to the newsstand if you need to see a picture of a nekkid woman any more. You can probably find one on the device you are reading right at this moment.
And society has become too cynical to really believe the model’s bio that says she loves puppies and walks along the beach, is working her way through medical school, and is looking for a guy just like you.
Why wouldn’t I believe she loves puppies?
Playboy really lost its cachet when the Rat Pack 1960s segued into the Psychedelic 1960s. The Youth Culture and Free Love made it obsolete.
Best exemplified by the January 1969 episode of “Playboy After Dark” featuring the Grateful Dead playing “Saint Stephen.” The young ladies undulate and groove to the live music, while their squires — looking like a bunch of square middle-aged dentists — are bewildered.
Also, Playboy lost all relevance when Harvey Kurtzman’s Little Annie Fanny ended. The most painstakingly and beautifully rendered comic strip in history.
Sorry, forgot to link the teevee episode…
Most of them looked more like cat people to me.
At least they’ve saved the best interviews in book form. They always were the best part of the magazine.
Yes, I typed that with a straight face.
Honestly, I enjoyed the cartoons.
I’m having a hard time remembering when Playboy was last relevant here in the US. When was the last time the Playmate of the Year was a big deal? The last two that I can remember was Anna Nicole Smith and Victoria Silvstedt and the latter was only because I saw the movie Baseketball and they kept mentioning her name in it. I hear Playboy and I think of a bygone era. You’re right though, the brand has a vast library and that’s got to be worth something.
I do hear the Playboy brand has some value in international markets. Playboy Enterprises has derived a significant portion of their revenue over the last few decades by licensing the Playboy image.
It is a little sad. As a little boy sneaking peeks at Playboys I never would have envisioned a world without that magazine.
They used to have coffee table books of the cartoons, I remember parents had one
You will note that the Playboy Philosophy said that what men did was cool. It was up to women to change to keep up with the times.
How is a morality that lets you do what you like different from having no morality at all?
I’ll miss it, I guess, but Playboy is one of those things where no matter when you look at it, you wish it was as good as you remember it used to be, and it never was. The big deal celebrity pictorials usually turned out to be either clothed, or maybe ten-twenty years after you really wanted to see them nude. Kim Basinger got hers in right on time, but everybody else… Marilyn and Madonna’s were swell, but neither of them had actual plans at the time to appear in Playboy. An enduring favorite feature–from sometime in the 50s, but I forget what issue–was the custom bed with shelves, a stereo, and a mini fridge all somehow attached to it. No plans were included, just a note to “show this to a carpenter and he can figure it out.”
“I’ll make you read the whole issue, cover to cover, even the article by Norman Mailer about his diminishing libido.” “Wow, she’s good!”
Yeah I’ll miss the absolutely soulless sameness of the basically clothed models and the cartoon granny with the saggy football hooters.
Intersting i-views of Hunter S. Thompson, Gary Gilmore, and John Cassavetes, gotta say.
Your nose must be awful sore now.
Their slide has been a little depressing to watch over the past decade or so. At first, they would skip a month or two by printing the occasional double. Not ideal, obviously, but at least it sort of felt like they were kind of holding the line. Then they jumped all the way down to six issues a year. Then it was four. There wasn’t much more cutting to do without just deciding to be done with the whole thing altogether. What a drag.
And with Lenny Bruce, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Robert De Niro…
*Spy *magazine did a piece back in the 90s pointing out that relations between men and women had changed too much for Playboy to stay relevant in the long run. The business model–convincing middle-aged men to buy expensive stuff in order to look rich and sophisticated and attract beautiful young women–drew advertisers like flies to honey.
But that looked silly by the 1990s. One line from the Spy article summed it up succinctly: “Nowadays, it’s the guy with washboard abs who lands the girl, not the guy with the paisley ascot driving the English sports car.”
And at the risk of sounding repetitive, the interviews were often really good. You didn’t see such controversial topics and individuals in more mainstream publications back then.