Photojournalist the hell out of things with this Dick Tracy camera

You’d be forgiven if you completely missed that this old-timey camera and developing kit was under the Dick Tracy merchandising tent. After all, his name appears nowhere in the copy. But there it is, along with his little tiny square-jawed mug, right there on the front of the camera in question (here’s a look at a real one). This name-drop reticence seems odd when viewed from today’s saturation bombing of brand names in advertising, but it was probably par for the course back in the 1940s. A SIMPLER TIME. When men were men and women loved them for it. And when said men took really crappy bathing beauty pics of their best girls with cheap novelty (Dick Tracy) cameras.

And then again, maybe Tracy just wasn’t someone to toot his own horn. We have old Captain Tootsie ads to support that.