Kirk Demarais's Blog, page 14

COMIC AD PARODYS

A couple of professional comic ad parodies via Bully's Comics...

From What The--? #5 (July 1989), by Marc Siry and Russ Heath (who illustrated the original 132 Roman Soldiers ad)

From Avengers 1½ (December 1999)

I also just discovered this Mad Magazine parody of a Johnson Smith and Co. Catalog via Doug Gliford's Mad Cover Site, click to enlarge...

THE JOKE'S ON PEE-WEE

Here's the latest in my unending effort to document the appearances of S.S. Adams brand pranks in television and film. (previous sightings here and here.) This time I've spotted some gems adorning the walls of the hallowed Pee-Wee's Playhouse. A more appropriate home there could not be.

As you are well aware, Pee-Wee ends each episode by opening a hidden panel that conceals his beloved scooter before embarking on a world-wide road trip. If one were to take a screenshot of the eclectic decor covering the secret door it might look like this...


Hidden among the vintage ephemera, the jumbo plastic scissors, the Wacky Wall Walker, the plastic skull, the black fuzzy dice, the rubber face puppet, and the J.R. Bob Dobbs are a few items I'd like to point out.

Note the magenta-colored package in the upper right corner...


That's none other than a genuine 1960's era S.S. Adams Smokie Mule, seen in lung-filling action here...


For those consumers who found the notion of a smoking mule offensive Adams offered a smoking dog...



And if you don't mind moving your eyeballs slightly to the left and following the arrows...


You'll witness the Adams coin changer trick, mint in original stretch-pak. (Note my sophisticated collectors' jargon.)


It's not Adams brand, but the other item is this classic "Hanging Skeleton" from an era when hanging skeletons didn't need trendy brand names determined by extensive market research.


And the red item centered on the right...


...is an early package of "Whoops" brand fake vomit by the H. Fishlove Company.


Hats off to Pee-Wee and Gary Panter (who did the show's set design) for understanding the greatness of these classic items and using them to further enhance our Saturday mornings.

Boy, wouldn't it be great to see annotated photos of the entire playhouse? Please Mr. Internet, make it so.

MAIL-ORDER MYSTERIES E-BOOK NOW AVAILABLE

Hi everybody! If lack of shelf space has been keeping you from ordering Mail-Order Mysteries then you may be interested to know that it's now available as an e-book on the iTunes iBook iStore, just iClick here. It's currently nineteen bucks.

The book has continued to exceed my wildest hopes. It ranked #9 in "Hardcover Humor" on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list. It was one of USA Today's best graphic novels of 2011 and has gotten sweet coverage on LA Times, The Onion AV Club, Laughing Squid, Superpunch, Bookgasm, Strange Kids Club and Forces of Geek to name a handful. Also Tom Scharpling of The Best Show on WFMU, a cultural hero of mine, tweeted that it was Legitimately fascinating and fun.



Lastly, Steve Shive of "Steve Likes to Curse" made a really wonderful video review. His is the reaction I was hoping to get. (And by the way Steve, the way you pronounce my last name is totally accurate in its country of origin, however the Americanized version rhymes with "embarrass.")

THE "LOST" MAIL-ORDER MYSTERIES

As I worked on the layouts for my book Mail-Order Mysteries, the limited number of pages quickly became my enemy. In fact, early in the process Kevin Toyama, my amazing editor, was granted a request to bump up the page count to better accommodate all the goodies. But even with the added space there were a number of items that didn't make it. Some never even appeared in the rough layouts and some kept getting shifted around before finally getting cut at the last minute. But thanks to the internet these images needn't go unseen, actually you will be looking at them in just a few seconds!
I should clarify that none of the deleted products would have received a write-up, rather they were going to serve as little extras throughout the book.

12 Ivory Elephants in a Bean- Of all the omissions this one is probably the most heartbreaking for me. It's such an awesomely bizarre product and I've talked to a number of people who are very enthusiastic about them. They were available apart from comic advertising, and I think they're actually still being produced. As you see the "elephants" are nothing more than rectangular flecks of ivory with a few slits in them for appendages. Now that I think of it I'm not sure why I didn't make these a full page entry to begin with. Stupid, stupid!!


Fully Furnished Doll House- This is another regrettable cut mainly because it was a pretty popular ad and it exemplifies the "it's actually made of cardboard" principle. It actually came with a little packet of seeds for growing a real "lawn." This belongs to my friend Eddie of HouseOfTheUnusual.com who supplied a lot of the rarest stuff in the book.


Whack Jack Tension Reliever- This is a fun item but the poor guy already looks so world-weary that it doesn't feel right to smash him. I remember these being sold in my mom's catalogs like Lillian Vernon and Harriet Carter.


Spook Hand- I love the great illustrations and the spooky approach. These were available in monster magazines as well as comics. The Spook Hand was a product of H. Fishlove, makers of fake vomit and jumbo sunglasses. This was a part of a really cool "party prank" kit that I demonstrated here.


Franco American's Shock Book- A classic item, but I'd already covered plenty of pranks. Unlike the Joy Buzzer which simply vibrates, the Shock Book really gives a mild electric shock. (courtesy of Eddie at HouseOfTheUnusual.com)



The Secret Agent Periscope- It's cool but I'd already included the Secret Spy Scope which was a comic book staple for years. Plus, this ad didn't appear very often. It works better than the Spy Scope and seems a bit more practical especially considering the Spy Scope's weak magnification. However the mirror in mine has been dislodged so I don't spend nearly as much time at my neighbor's privacy fence.



Moto-Bot- Being from 1985 this is the most recent Mail-Order Mystery but that's the main reason it didn't quite gel with the rest of the stuff in the book.
Do I even have to mention that it's a cheap GoBots/Transformers knock-off? Oops, too late. I did make certain to find the exact model that's pictured in the ad, a fact I'm both proud and ashamed of. Say, I'll bet I could secure the Moto-Bots film rights for a song.


Martial Arts Patches- These garden variety patches are the kind of thing I would have worn thinking it would scare off adversaries, only to discover they create a bully-tempting effect.


Flipit Frankenstein- I've always liked this thing because for one it's Frankenstein, and it's also sort of a hybrid of a couple types of comic book novelties. Giant monsters in comic offers were always either balloons or two dimensional images and this is both. But the Flipits are to be commended for their forthright advertising and use of officially licensed characters.



These guys are wonderful but I didn't have a full ad for them. The illustration above shows up as a design element on a full page advert for an outfit called the "House of Laffs." I've seen them available in novelty distribution catalogs but never direct-to-consumer. You may wonder why this matters. I have no idea. Incidentally, the devil head is very similar to the one that appears on The Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner and the Mystic Seer fortune telling machine.



Bleeding Skull Candle- As it is, the book is populated with quite a lot of skulls but one really shouldn't put a limit on such a thing. (a skull-cap... brilliant!) I bought one of these only to discover that it was slightly misshapen so I used a heat-based skull re-shaping treatment that I developed myself. I ended up ruining it. So months later I found another one at an almost decent price and there he is. Add those up (plus shipping) and that's over fifty bucks I spent for what turned out to be a nice blog decoration. I don't mean to sound bitter but that's roughly twice my annual skull candle budget.


150 Civil War Soldiers- This is a nifty set with a great ad, but in the soldier section the book already covers WWII Army men, Revolutionary Soldiers, Roman Soldiers, Knights in armor, and Pirates. For some reason these have the honor of being even flimsier and more poorly crafted than any of the others.


Abracadabra catalog- Funny how the illustration in the ad looks oversimplified when actually it's almost photo-realistic aside from the exaggerated colors. (courtesy of Eddie at HouseOfTheUnusual.com)


250 Magic Tricks- Yup, it's a magic book much like the one in the picture. I must say that swami guy in the ad sure looks amazing.



The Apple Worm Bank- This one is missed because it rings familiar with many people. The fact that it was widely available is actually one of the reasons I didn't give it full coverage, and I already included a couple other coin banks. Photography-wise I was quite pleased with my chalkboard/school desk backdrop, smug even. Thus the adage "pride comes before the fall."


And here's a photograph that there just wasn't a place for. In the early 1990s my pal Eddie (yes, of the House of the Unusual) revived a mail-order company called the Fun Factory. Their ads appeared in DC comics and Eddie tore open envelopes stuffed with change and fulfilled the orders with classic funmakers. This was the last time many of these things would ever be found in the pages of comic books. Anyway, the photo is a stack of actual coupons that were mailed in from kids all over the country.


This seems like an appropriate place to share a few behind the scenes photos too. Here's a shot of one of my state of the art photography studios...

And here's the picture I took which does appear in the book...


Here's my portable set up that I hauled up to New Jersey where my friend Eddie lives (he runs some web site, I'll have to look that up.) Those utility lamps cost upwards of six dollars (or one fifth the price of a vintage skull candle).

The setup consists of a light tent, a laptop, a power strip, extension chords and a scanner, everything you need to give the TSA cause to search you at every opportunity. When I arrived home the scanner had magically transformed into a plastic box full of glass shards.

Here's me in my kitchen setting up a shot of "floating" magic tricks...


After some photoshopping, here's the result...


For the shot of the "Smokie Pet," a plastic dog that smokes fake cigarettes that you really light, I thought it would be funny to photograph him standing on a bed of ashes in front of a raging fire (Get it? Because kids could burn down their houses.) Here was my solution which took hours to set up...

I managed to snap the photo before that cardboard box ignited and fell out of the fireplace. It didn't cause any damage because I doused it with a precautionary bucket of water. The gallons of ash-water required much effort to clean up, but I got my precious shot...



Lastly, there are another set of items that I consider "lost." As I compiled the products for the book I often asked myself "What am I missing that folks will want to see?" Now that I've heard so much great feedback I can answer that. The most asked-about items that are not covered are the "build your own hovercraft plans" and the "monkey in a tea cup."

I'm well aware of the ad for the do-it-yourself hovercraft but since I already had the remote control hovercraft represented as well as several sets of plans, I didn't include them. I even had access to these very plans. You see, I have this friend named Eddie who owns them.

There were many monkey ads but the tea cup really stuck in the collective memory. These "pets" were indeed real, often causing harm to their new owners when first released. Ideally I hoped to get my hands on a photo of a genuine mail-order monkey but that never happened. I was tempted to use a stock photo of a Rhesus or Squirrel monkey, but I eventually decided that everyone knows what a monkey looks like. (That's the same reason I didn't cover the 411 piece fishing set, one of the hoped-for items of an Amazon reviewer.)

This concludes our tour of the extraneous mail-order mysteries. I hope you had as much fun viewing them as I did researching, buying, photographing and then deleting them.

THE JP SHOW

And in the "almost too late to be worth mentioning" news there was an excellent art show over the weekend called The JP (Just People) Show. It was curated by the amazing artist Brandon Bird and features a number of artists' depictions of the humans from the Jurassic Park films, no dinosaurs allowed.

It was my honor to participate in the event and I decided to pay tribute to a human who helped contribute to the success of the franchise early on, Chip Kidd....


In addition to being a personal influence and cultural hero of mine, Chip designed the book cover for Michael Crichton's best selling novel which helped establish him as the most revered book cover designer of our time. In Mr. Kidd's live presentations he likes to point out that he traced the famous dinosaur bone profile from an illustration in a book and then simplified it and converted it into silhouette. Thus the title of the piece is "Chip Kidd breaks new ground in the art of book cover design by simply tracing an image from "Vertebrate Paleontology And Evolution" by Robert L. Carroll." Chip was quite surprised when his work became the central image in the film's marketing and merchandising campaign.

Check out more of the work on Brandon's site

WORLD OF THE UNEXPLAINED MUSEUM BROCHURE

Cryptozoologist Robert Robinson shares with us a rare look at a vintage brochure for the "World of the Unexplained" museum formerly located in Gatlinburg Tennessee...



Yes that is a naked woman. To explain the Unexplained, it's a statue based on a witch named Monique Wilson. Thanks to this paragraph, this post will bring a whole new set of Googler's.

The museum was open from 1972 to 1985 and was owned by Ripley's (as in Believe It or Not). It was originally called the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic but the name was changed to give it wider appeal.

Here's a brochure for their San Francisco location that I grabbed from ebay...



Few things embody "creepy" like gritty 1970s unexplained phenomenon documentaries. Imagine the terror of walking into one.

UPDATE: Robert also shares this great postcard from the museum's witchcraft days...

DARLING PET MUNKEE

Darling Pet Munkee is a "garage/surf rock supergroup" that's offering a free seven song EP based entirely on comic book mail-order ads.

From their press release...
"Sea-Monkeys, X-Ray Specs, and a necklace full of soil from Dracula's castle are among the many bizarre items that were sold in comic-book ads of yore. Garage/surf rock supergroup Darling Pet Munkee aims to tell the tales of these lost items in song. For the next 6 months, the band will be releasing one song a month - with accompanying history - examining the bizarre knick-knacks sold via these misleading ads that promised fighting skills, wondrous creatures, and grand journeys."

The songs can be heard and freely downloaded here.
The stories and history behind each song can be found here.

It's great seeing others take creative inspiration from these beloved advertisements. It makes me feel like less of a freak.

MAIL-ORDER MASK OF THE GHOST RIDER

The proud owner of this mail-away Ghost Rider mask shares with us this nifty photo of his super-rare collectible. This version of Ghost Rider originated with a comics publisher called Magazine Enterprises but after the trademark lapsed Marvel put out their own version of the character which was eventually named Phantom Rider.

Here's the comic book ad which looks to be from the 1950s...


The actual product is simple yet cool looking (aside from the unavoidable KKK comparison). Plus it possesses that perfect, ever-endearing quality— it glows in the dark.

Unfortunately, it seems that I'll be mentally singing Ghost Riders in the Sky for the next week or so.