I saw this in Detective Comics 266 from 1959, thought it was unintentionally hilarious.
(Uploaded to Imagr and Imagebb. Hopefully this will cover everyone.)
Some people might not know that “Long hair music” in 1959 referred to Classical Music.
No doubt, 1950s DC would be pilloried as woke by today’s standards.
Exactly so. It wasn’t until the '60s that “unacceptably long” hair started to be associated with rock musicians.
One of our local radio stations used to play, late at night, a syndicated program of old radio shows; one of the shows in their rotation was Adventures of Superman, typically episodes from the late '40s and early '50s. There were a number of episodes in which the show’s announcer would deliver public-service messages, encouraging young listeners to be accepting of different races and ethnicities, similar to the message on the comic-book page in the OP.
Especially since they were plugging the National Social Welfare Assembly on that page.
Why does the page appear twice in the OP?
The UK can’t see Imgur, some others say they have problems with Imagebb, I tried both.
I dislike alligators and spiders. Does that lower my BQ?
Your answer reminds me of
On a more serious note, I searched up the
Darn shame their ~100 years of work can be out-shouted by Limbaugh / Faux / et al in the space of just 20 years.
Not woke enough to include any mention of females, sadly.
I remember these ads! I’m not old enough to have read them when they were new, but comics of that vintage sold for about a nickel each when I was a kid, so I read a lot of them.
There are females depicted in the illustrations. And the target audience included a lot of (“Girls are icky”) prepubescent boys. More interesting is the apparent gender-neutral use of words like “brotherhood” and “men” (in “all men are created equal”) back in the day. The same organization was responsible for the ad below.
It must seem quaint to someone who didn’t live through the 50s. Personally, I don’t see anything hilarious in it.
Wow, definitely ahead of the times!
They should start running it again.
The answer key is in the lower-right corner. Answers for non-human likes or dislikes don’t matter, but disliking humans lowers your score.
I lived through that time and I don’t see anything hilarious in it, either.
Consider Tom Leher’s hilarious little ditty, National Brotherhood Week. Except read the lyrics without hearing an audience laugh.
And it’s a reference to musicians of an earlier era - specifically, 19th-century romantics like Liszt, with their trademark flowing tresses. Very few male classical musicians in the 1950s had long hair, aside from Glenn Gould.
That was a few years later, when there were actual efforts (often ineffectual and not universally respected) to achieve some kind of racial equality, often by people who were pretty clueless about how a lot of people really felt. It was that tension between aspirations and accomplishments that made the song funny. I don’t find it funny any more, the world has changed too much, and I’ve lost a lot of illusions.
Nope. The issue is that Yes answers should go in B, C & D. It even says “all of us have some thing we dont like…but when they are people- you hurt them and cheat yourself”.
I concur.
From a cynical enough POV you could marvel at the wide-eyed innocence of this effort to raise consciousness in e.g. 8yo boys. And then laugh at the sponsors for their childlike innocence and earnest true-believerness.
I could sure see a modern MAGA reading this and laughing with both utter contempt and genuine mirth at how dumb this is and how utterly useless it’s been.
If they were analytical enough (and most aren’t) they’d be thinking “It’s been 65 years. The reality of indelible racial differences, and the legitimacy of racism arising from that, is a central feature of humanity just as it has ever been and shall always be. Wokies can wish otherwise, but reality knows different. Ha ha ha, you stupid do-gooders with your stupid comics.”
This led me to learn about Anna Rosenberg. Wow.
It’s actually surprisingly progressive for its time, even if it’s absurdly out of step with modern sensibilities.