So I’m eating lunch with my girlfriend this Sunday at the local Johnny Rockets. For those who are not familiar, these are 1940’s-esque dinner themed restaurants known mostly for their shakes and burgers.
Anyhow, they have a lot of these period Coca Cola ads. Well, they FREAK ME OUT. They remind me of Nazi war propaganda posters. All the characters are blonde with blue eyes and just too damn happy. They look freakin creepy.
Some examples:
They’re a bit scary, I admit, but they come from an era prior to the type of advertising we’re used to. These are drawn images depicting a stylized ideal. What we’re used to seeing is impossibly beautiful people made up and shot in the most flattering way imaginable. They, too, bear little resemblance to real life.
I don’t know if I would say this is like NAZI propaganda. The NAZIs didn’t tend to show this kind of “hedonistic” enjoyment. If people were smiling, it was because they were climbing a mountain or hailing the fueher. Or they showed the rigid control of Riefenstahl’s films.
Intellectually, I knew this. The ballooning American serving size, and all that. Still, seeing those tiny glasses just gives me a sad feeling, somehow. I bet that soft-handed dude in the straw boater nursed that 6.5 oz of Coke for a good long time, 'cause it was a forspecial. Am I happier with my Big Gulp that that guy was with his cordial glass? I imagine my grandkids will get the same feeling, looking back through the family album over a 24 oz glass of Red Bull.
OK, in all the arguments about Nazi or not I think we’re missing the boat here: a moment of awe and praise for msmith537’s skill at writing funny creepy caption lines for old ad photos. You know, m, that skill’s salable. Cuz you’re good at it. Reaally really good.
Or ought to be salable.
You read Lileks ever?
Second, my local paper ran an article yesterday on the decreasing frequency of blue eyes in the American population. In 1900 half the people in America were blue eyed. By 1950, a third. Today, one in six. Increasing intermarriage with brown-eyed people plus immigration by brown-eyed people is the cause. A guy got interested in it when he noticed how many blue-eyed old folks there were in nursing homes where he worked; his initial hypothesis was that blue eyes made you live longer, but that turned out to be a crock; it was just that blondes with blue eyes intermarried a lot in the Nordic-admiring 1900-oughts, because of the cultural taboo against marrying out of the race, and so lots of recessive phenotypes were preserved. So the prevalence of blondes and blue eyes in this may reflect what people were accustomed to seeing around them.
Or just the pro-blonde prejudice which gave us all those dyed platinums of the 1930’s-60’s, which tied in nicely with the Nazi Aryan fixation. Have it both ways, why not.
The current most favored phenotype by advertisers is said to be honey-colored skin with dark brown hair and either brown or green eyes. Brazilians are hitting modeling big.
Personally I can’t wait until it’s ebony skin and the pure African head; I love that shape.
There’s going to be a heck of a lot of honey-skinned brown-haired kids with blue eyes in the F3 and F4 generations, though.
I bet those tiny 6oz cokes were made with cane sugar, not corn syrup, and thus a lot tastier than the 64oz crap that passes for a soft drink these days. Advertising today is just as silly as it was then if you stop and think about it.
Not really, except that they’re both painted advertising posters of young caucasian females. Honestly, I think it may be just that we’re unused to seeing painted advertising posters these days, so we exaggerate the similarities between them. If we were more used to seeing them, we’d look past the medium more.
