Is that an Arby’s hat prototype on the Slim Jim package? Kind of makes sense in a way. Both brands offer beefish food-like products, and both give you irredeemable heartburn. Synergy!
See the movie, now playing at your local theater. Read the comics, now selling at your local newsstand comic book shop.
(You’re welcome, DC.)
If you were a child of the 1980s and wanted a plush toy, but wanted one with a disturbing twist, then the Popples were probably your thing. They combined softness, big eyes, pastels, and the imagined gooeyness of an amniotic sac. For fun!
They arrived at an ickiness similar to the Cabbage Patch Kids, just by another route.
Old-timey Georgia Bulldogs football coach Wally Butts definitely has the look of a man who was teased relentlessly in his youth for his last name — fellow Wheaties endorsers Phil Rizzuto, Hank Greenberg, Tom Jones and Ralph Kiner all brought a more cheerful (or at least less severe) élan to their ads. I’m sure most of the slights endured by Mr. Butts were eventually taken out on the gridders under his tutelage. And I’m sure they were all thrilled to be nicknamed “The Butts Boys.”
Of the many cartoon ideas that came around in the 1980s, few were more promising in concept but disappointing in execution than the funny pages mash-up known as Defenders of the Earth. For those unfamiliar, it was the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of its day, uniting three King Features Syndicate newspaper strip stars — Flash Gordon, the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician — in one unstoppable team. They banded together to battle Ming the Merciless, Flash Gordon’s bête noire and mustache-twirling galactic threat, as well as other lesser and associated threats. Which all sounds great — all three character’s on their own were kind of cool in their way — and what could go wrong?
Unfortunately, they had their dopey kids in tow. Which ruined everything.
The 1940s: A halcyon snack food time, when Baby Ruth candy bars could be touted as pseudo-healthy
Baby Ruths: Candy bars and ingredients for happy lives, filled with all kinds of healthy dextrose. Swell! (Lifeline from G.I. Joe is not amused — knowing is indeed half the battle.)
Are we supposed to think that those spectral Baby Ruths on the kitchen table are the ghosts of the bars that were slaughtered to make the cookies?
Like the Wonder Woman “Pussy” ad, the Wonder Woman “Booby” ad will have you craving Twinkies
Sex sells, whether it’s subliminally placed in advertisements or in methods not so subliminal — as it once was is this old Wonder Woman Twinkies ad, in which the word “pussy” (as part of “pussycat”) was used roughly 800 times in one page of panels. Today the password is “booby.” As in “booby trap.” Or “Wonder Woman has a great set of boobies.” Commence Beavis and Butthead chortling. “Juvenile” indeed.
Also: Stun gun use implied, apparently. We can only hope that one day, should we be blessed with a big screen WW film, it has such intricately woven writing.
Man of Steel is out and in theaters. If you’ve seen it, great. If you haven’t, maybe get around to it at some point. In either case, feel free to read the review I posted, which I enjoyed putting together just about as much as anything else I’ve ever put on here — for whatever that’s worth. Since then, I’ve seen MoS again — I live a five-minute walk from a theater, all right? — and I found myself actually liking it more a second time around. Again, for whatever that’s worth.
Anyway, I thought it might be nice to organize some links to some of the better, crappier, and loonier Superman stuff we’ve looked at here during this blog’s relatively brief existence. A digest of sorts. Click on the following links if you’d like to ponder some Supery material. If not, no harm no foul.
Superman II Topps cards? Superman II Topps cards.
Superman doesn’t fare well under a red sun. And he’s always prone to getting half-nude.
Gee, you think Lex Luthor might turn up in a sequel? Brush up on his Unauthorized Biography.
Superman HATES party crashing.
The time Superman met the young version of himself who wasn’t the young version of himself. And that young version of himself that wasn’t the young version of himself would one day go on to kill the young version of himself who was a clone of himself and the older version of himself who wasn’t an older version of himself.
Take a Golden Age Superman quiz.
Yes, there was a Sword of Superman.
The comic that taught me that you can swim in quicksand. Knowledge for life.
You want Superman mashed into an H.G. Wells classic? Here you go. (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, too.)
And there’s more. Maybe we’ll save them for the sequel. Happy Father’s Day to all the pops out there.
War by land and sea — “God help me, I do love it so.”
There’s something much more clean and antiseptic about a distant shot of Navy vessels duking it out and Air Force fighters dogfighting and raining down death. Something much less sanguinary that your usual bloody — and occasionally hellish — box of men ad.
Really, with neat stuff like what you see up there, how could we ever disarm?
For a long, long while, the DC Comics movie machine has been half-stellar, half-embarrassment. Sure, Christopher Nolan’s Batman films re-energized that character, erasing the sour taste of the 1990s Joel Schumacher sequels (which had in turn wiped out the good will from the two quirky Tim Burton entries). But Superman Returns, Bryan Singer’s 2006 attempt to kickstart the long-dead Richard Donner continuity, suffered from its rehash feel (cataclysmic real estate swindle), a misunderstanding of the character (Stalkerman), and simple boredom (our hero lifted things — he lifted things a lot). And the less said about the Ryan Reynolds-infused Green Lantern, an abortive attempt to mine secondary DC heroes, the better. Read more…
Forget Legos — 100 magnets can work magic, build vague, clunky toys, and wipe data. Enjoy!
If the colorful, interlocking-plastic-blocks magic of Legos is somehow anathema to you, then maybe 100 unadorned magnets will be more suited to your Spartan aesthetic tastes. And you can erase audiotapes and strip the data from your parents’ credit cards! A plus!
FYI, no human being in the history of the world has ever been as amazed by a simple magnet as that blond kid. Not even uncontacted South American tribesmen.
This bodybuilding ad is a somewhat bizarre fusion of the bum’s refrain (“Brother, can you spare a dime?”) and the usual he-man puffery. The March of Dimes can take their loose change and shove it apparently, because “the handsome new jet power you” can be purchased with the same ten cents.
The guy on the right was once six feet tall and 120 pounds, or so that copy says. Unless he was born of a broomstick, I’m going to have to cry foul on that.
Join Namor on the metaphorical couch for some weak Freudian/Atlantean psychoanalysis – Sub-Mariner #38
There’s no character more in need of some time on a psychiatrist’s couch than Namor, the Sub-Mariner. How many times has he invaded the surface world again? How many times has a taken either a minor incident or an imagined slight and elevated it into an enormous causus belli? A justification for yet another sea vs. land war of survival? How often has he displayed a lack of patience that would take Yosemite Sam aback? Is there a character that carries more tension in his face than Namor? (I mean, just look at those eyebrows.)
You think maybe, just maybe, this might have something to do with his upbringing? An Oedipal complex that generates outright hostility to his human father’s old dominion? What from his life made him who he is? Read more…
Joining the old GRIT sales team never makes sense, no matter how many GRIT-evangelizing ads we see. And could the verbiage get any stiffer than the giant “LOOK, FELLOWS!” at the top? Squaresville, man. Strictly Squaresville.
Also, the Boo Radley-looking kid appears to be wearing a shirt hewn from wood.
Isn’t calling this a “computer box” a bit much? An abacus is more of a computer. It seems a lot like something Homer Simpson would give as a desperate, last-minute gift to Lisa on her birthday. And I would trust no computations from Alpha-Bits, which hails from the cereal D-list, just above generic gruel like Frosty Flakes and Toasted Os. It was one of the cereals you’d experience when you were a kid and stayed over at your weirdo friend’s house, and had a bowl of strange gunk put in front of you the next morning at the breakfast table. GET ME OUT OF HERE.
Jared
blog into mystery 