For Scent-imental Reasons

I thought I'd take a look at the selling of men's fragrances over the past decades, and how it's changed.

Perfumes, colognes and aftershaves frequently use some sort of sexy ad campaign. My interest was see if I pinpoint the moment when sex was first used to sell men's fragrance products.

I can say with almost complete confidence sex was never used to sell men's fragrances in the 1950's. For example this commercial from 1957 for Old Spice aftershave emphasizes health and value...



I hope you're sitting down, but sex in men's fragrance ads seems to start sometime in the late 1960's.  Shocking, I know.  In 1960 Old Spice was still sold like this...

... and it's not sexy in the slightest.  Then whole sexual revolution thing happens, and in 1967 we have a spicy ad like this for Centaur "Massage" Cologne...

I can't personally identify with that breaded guy, but I do like the idea of a beautiful and extra busty personal masseur.

The male in this next 1968 ad for St. Johns cologne is much easier to identify with...

The above ad demonstrates a sexy two pronged marketing attack that many ads like this take.  First there's a handsome male model that can make one think, "If I use this product I could be like this guy."  Second is the use of this product will make one irresistible to the opposite sex.  St. Johns has helped the guy above snag three hot blonds - that's a lot of bang for your buck so to speak.

The Hai Karate commercial below from the late 60's is a classic example of the "irresistible to the opposite sex" marketing campaign...



I think that's still very funny today.

English Leather was introduced in 1949, and by 1969 advertised with this suggestive slogan...

Here's a entertainingly epic one, the very subtly named Jovan Sex Appeal from 1978 with art super manly fantasy art by Frank Frazetta...

...and the extra awesome commercial animated by Richard Williams.


By 1979 Old Spice got sexy with their bedroom couple advertisement for Musk For Men...

I like this two page tease from the makers of English Leather.  On the left side of the page is a sexy model wrapped in a large flannel shirt with the "cool" Timberline...

On the right page we get the "hot" pay off with Wind Drift...

I'm strangely fascinated by the scenario in this Paco Rabbane ad from 1984...

The clunky soap opera dialog ad copy is a hoot.  The guy in the towel must be some sort of wealthy classical musician.  I don't think someone living on the average metropolitan symphony wage could afford such a fancy big city apartment.   Below is the ad copy for easy reading, and print out. It's my hope this scene will be acted out in drama classes around the world, and might even become the next hot YouTube meme...

Hello?

I hope you sit on a lute!

Ah, the sweet song of the morning
grouch!

You didn’t say goodbye.

I didn’t want to wake you.

Who could sleep when there's a hunk
with no clothes on wandering around
at five in the morning, humming
Vivaldi and knocking over furniture?

You have an ear of tin. It was Bruch.
And I’m playing it this afternoon
up in Boston for the Ladies of the
Noble Order of Sweater-and-Pearls.
What are you doing?

Lying here, thinking of you. You
know, I can smell your Paco Rabanne.
It’s like you were still here.

I wish I were.

I couldn’t go back to sleep, remembering 
everything. I wanted to hear
your voice. It has the most interesting
effect on me . . .

Maybe I should run over and read you
a bedtime story or something.

Or something. 

...and end scene.

I hope you all have fun with that.

Jumping to the present day with AXE body spray, and their newish commercial that sorta reminds me of the old Hai Karate spots taken to a spectacular scale...


This BOD Man Fragrance Spray commercial has that "sexy two pronged marketing attack" thing going on.  Is the setting a hotel?  I associate an ice machine with a hotel, but either way this guy didn't break a sweat to get great results...


The packaging for BOD is curious. It looks like I might find it down the supermarket cleaning aisle.  Maybe BOD could replace my bottle of Formula 409, and be my new personal fragrance.  Hmmm, that reminds me of product from an old SNL skit that was two things in one...


Hey since I started this post with Old Spice let's take a look a current magazine ad...

Their ad agency has gone totally insane.  Is insanity the new sexy?

Well let's close this post with probably the best manly cologne commercial ever. All the way from Japan it's Charles Bronson for Mandom. If you've made it this far, and you've never seen this before you're in for a real treat...

 

Dirty Home Movies

Valentine's Day will soon be upon us, and continuing the tradition I started last year this means my posts for the month are going to be extra sexy (or maybe even smutty).  I'm gonna take this PG rated blog of mine, and go all the way to PG-13 mister! So parents, consider yourselves strongly cautioned.  

Once upon a time, way back in the 1970's, if one wanted to watch a "dirty movie" at home it was an actual film.  No VCR's available for sale at Sears yet, and the Internet was the stuff of science fiction.

Say hello to the Luminavision "Deluxe Quality Movie Viewer."  This baby is perfect for viewing color or black & white 8MM or Super 8 films.  I like how the ad copy states "complete portability to parties or for sales presentations."  Yeah right, on that small screen?  More like portability for solo use in basements, closets and bathrooms...

 
That ad above ran in both gentlemens' magazines and Popular Science.

The days of the Luminavision were numbered, and the vastly superior home video technology soon completely dominates the scene by the early 1980's. Although early on mail-order X-rated movie companies carried both videotapes and film - like in this 1979 ad from Mitchell Brothers' ...

Love the holiday themed ad.  Yes, pornography really does make a great Christmas gift.  Also check out the prices.  A Marilyn Chambers film goes for the top dollar of $129 - adjusted for inflation that's $407.96 in today's dollars!  Wow that's so hard to believe when basically any filth your heart desires is only a few clicks away for free nowadays. For the budget minded there's the 8MM "famous Swedish Erotica series" for only $20 ($63.25 adjusted for inflation).

Some companies like Direct Video jumped into mail-order video tapes exclusively...

All those films go for $99.50 ($277.24 adjusted for inflation), and that's still pretty damn pricey.  The ad states "VHS recorded on TDK brand tape" which is good to know I guess.  I wonder if TDK paid for this endorsement.

Two of those 70's porn films above have extra special meaning for me.  When I was in junior high a friend of mine found a video tape in his parents closet with a handwritten label titled "Watergate."  This tape was something insanely extincting and irresistible to a small group of hormonally charged young boys - a classic porn double feature.  First up was Deep Throat (1972) ("Watergate" get it?), followed by The Devil in Miss Jones (1973).  These were the first X-rated films I had ever seen, and it made for a very educational (and vaguely disturbing) afternoon.

A word to those 1980's parents out there, mislabeling your pornographic videotapes is no deterrent for a determined and horny adolescent young boy.  The more you know...

Nat Geo's Two Takes on Disney Animation

Here's a post that's pretty frivolous, but hardcore Disney fans (and I know you're out there) might dig it.

In August 1963 National Geographic Magazine ran a lengthy article titled "The Magic Worlds of Walt Disney." It's become a true collectors issue among Disneyphiles, and you can checkout the entire article online over on Modern Mechanix if you so wish.

Four pages of the article illustrate how animated films are made with Micky Mouse giving Mr. G.O. Graphic a guided tour of the studio as other Disney characters work on The Sword in the Stone (1963)...

Fourteen years later in November 1977 National Geographic basically dusted off the 1963 illustrations for reuse in their children's World magazine...

... although it's been completely redrawn, and this time Mr. G.O. Graphic is just simply a "human visitor" who gets a peek at the production of The Rescuers (1977)...

I think I prefer the 1963 version of the illustrations, and I thought the name of Mr. G.O. Graphic was pretty clever.  I also like how Micky Mouse was dressed in 1963...

There's a lot of differences between the illustrations.  Print this next image out, and hand it to a child who you'd like to keep busy for a while...

I wonder if National Geographic ever considered using these illustrations again.  I doubt it, but I like to specualate what a 1980's, 1990's or 2000's version would have looked like.

 

Movies at the Mall

A movie theater located in the local shopping mall just seems sooo last century to me.  I think their popularity probably peaked sometime back in the early 1980's.  In fact the mall that's closest to me, Twelve Oaks, converted its movie theater space into a food court about 10 years ago (food courts seem sooo last century also).

The Movies at Twelve Oaks in Novi MI, are now just a memory, but we can relive its opening in 1977 with their informative flier...

Wow, I saw a lot of movies here, but surprisingly, I'm not very nostalgic for the place (I am nostalgic for that $1.25 admission). Even as a little kid I wasn't impressed by the shoebox-size theaters.  Although the flier points out that the theater's small size means the projected image is sharper - a small screen is now a selling point. Congratulations to those copywriters who spun a negative into a positive.

I did see George Romero's Dawn of the Dead at a Saturday midnight showing when I was a teen at Twelve Oaks, and a shopping mall cinema is probably the ideal location for this particular film.

New Year's Resolution

Hey it's 2013, and this is my first post of the new year.

You know, with the new year ending in the number 13 I thought I'd hear news reports of people stricken with a serious case of triskaidekaphobia, but I guess the entire media was preoccupied with the whole “fiscal cliff” thing.

Anyways I digress, a lot of people make New Year's resolutions around fitness.  "I'm going to loose weight" or "I'm going to exercise more" are resolutions made with the best of intentions that are mostly forgotten by February.  So to kick of the new year I thought I look back at a once very popular, but now basically kaput fitness system.

Personal confession time, I tried the Cybergenics system back in the 1990's...

My Cybergenics system didn't come with the entire array of supplements shown in the 1992 ad above (I wonder what's in the bottle with the eyedropper top on the very end).   There's some high prices on that ad, and lucky I didn't pay that much for my system.  I truly didn't expect to look like Franco Santoriello (the bodybuilder flexing in the upper right corner), but I figured even if it helps a little bit it was worth it.

Cybergenics was heavily advertized on TV.   Maybe you remember this sexy commercial...



If you didn't like that romance cover model-like spot, how about a "humorous" one with a former SNL funnyman...



Where have you gone, Joe Piscopo ?  A nation turns its lonely eyes to you (Woo, woo, woo).

Did it work?  Well I didn't find any magic in those supplements that came with the system. The real key to the Cybergenics program was in the small 5 X 4 inch "Phase 1 Manual."

And more specifically the "Zero-Effort Principle" training regime that was covered on 15 pages of the aproxamatly 55 page manual...

What was the "Zero-Effort Principle?"   It sounds easy, "zero-effort," but in reality it should be called "maximum-effort."  This training principle is basically to go heavy as possible.  You would first determine what is the maximum weight you could lift in one rep for a given exercise, and then work with 90% or 80% of that weight until failure. For the next set go with 70% or 50% to failure, followed with 40% to failure.  In order to correctly archive this you'll need a spotter/workout partner, and a proper gym.  Sorry if you were thinking you could do this all alone in your basement with a set of free weights.

Anyways the Cybergenics people were at one time making a lot of money off the system, and branched out with a number of different products like a "mega-fat loss system" called Cybertrim...

Wait a minute, the same model that was featured in the Cybergenics print ad is used in this ad too. So what is it?  Did he use Cybergenics or Cybertrim?  Hmm, something doesn't seem right.

The original Cybergenics manufacturer is no longer in business, but after a little Googling it appears someone has obtained the Cybergenics name, and it's back in some kind of fashion.  I don't know anything about this "new" Cybergenics system, but as Mike Brady once told his son Greg, "Caveat emptor."

Classified Christmas Cover-Up

A couple of days ago I met a mysterious one-armed stranger through the friend of a friend cousin's half-sister (twice removed) at midnight on a Chinese junk in the middle of the Adriatic Sea.  The stranger handed me, using his one good arm of course, a brown paper package tied up with string which just happens to be one of my favorite things.

I took the package, and quickly made it back to my awaiting dirigible where my robot pilot flew me home.  When I opened the package I was startled to find a classified government video recording from the early 1970's.  I was even more startled once I watched it, and knew I needed to share it with the world.

But first there was that wacky Mayan end-of-the-world thing on Friday.  I spent that day wrapped in aluminum foil, and curled up in the fetal position under my basement stairs. Some apocalypse that was. What a jip! Talk about being dressed up with no place to go.

Anyways, with that nuttiness all behind us it's time to finally share this video with the world.  This tape blows the pants off anything that WikiLeaks punk has ever posted...


Merry Christmas folks, and have a Happy New Year!

My Rubber Uglies

I intended to run this post back in October as part of my Halloween celebration, but personally, this post works just as well for Christmas.  These rubber monsters weren't as fancy as the stuff Santa would bring, but they were still some of my favorite childhood toys.

My Grandfather bought these creatures for me when we'd visit the novelty store at the local mall.  At least I think it was a novelty store, these were purchased when I was preschool age, and therefor it was before I could read.  If it was a toy store I think I would remember it a lot better.  All I can remember is the box of rubber monsters that sat on the counter near the register at the front of the store.  I'd pick one, my Grandfather paid for it, and we left the store. 

About a year ago I learned these monsters were officially called Rubber Uglies, and was spun off of Topps' Ugly Stickers which were mostly illustrated by Norman Saunders.  Although sometimes the display box called them Teacher's Pets (supposedly in the UK from what I've read)... 

Each of the "Uglies" has a name taken from the original Topps sticker.  For example  this is Al, and his twin Al...

As you can see the Al on the right has lost an arm.  One thing I don't understand are the different sculpts of the same creature.  Did the molds become worn, and entirely new molds were created from a new sculpture?  Or is one a knockoff?

Through the magic of Photshop I've fixed "Al #2's" missing arm.  Here's the rest of my collection...

The "Melvin" above is missing its two front pincher arms.  The arms of these rubber  monsters were easily torn during vigorous play.  I think when one arm came off this creature I intentionally removed the other to keep its symmetry. 

I once had a few other Rubber Uglies, but I think they've been permanently lost.  I'm kinda impressed I was able to scrounge up this many actually.  I'm very impressed with this collection and how it's displayed.  It's classy...

If you wish to lean more about Rubber Uglies you can visit the Rubber Uglies & Jigglers Forum.