WHAT IT MEANS

Damned if I know.

But. If I had to guess, I'd choose the handiest, most likely explanation: people respond better to inanimate objects if they have human characteristics. This theory, however, has two big problems.

1. The Anthrophagy Problem. A large number of these mascots were for food products. Why do people respond to food with human characteristics? If a carrot is smiling at us, or a fish gestures with a big grin, are we not killing them by eating them? Is their smile some sort of release from guilt? Go ahead, eat me - hell, I would! This takes on peculiar and bizarre dimensions in the case of Curly, the Cudahy Pig; in ad after ad, he is seen cooking and consuming pork. He is a pig whose job it is to eat pig and get you to eat pig.

Really, when you think about it, this not only makes no sense, it's downright creepy.

2. The Appliance Problem. Nowhere do you see TV sets, radios, freezers, et al with human features. Sometimes inanimate non-food objects have human characteristics, such as the Swift Bland Lard container: he is a grotesque creature with a can for a body, arms and legs but no head. In one illustration he is blowing a trumpet even though he has no lips. But you'll never see a TV or radio with legs, or a freezer with a face - that would stray into the spooky territory of the talking trees in "The Wizard of Oz." So there was some sort of line they didn't dare cross, even if they didn't know they had drawn it.

There are other questions, of course.

1. Who cares? Well, I do, obviously. When I go back to the archives of the newspapers from which these mascots have been extracted, I rarely read the stories. I read the ads. Every day around 11:30 AM the librarians are used to the sound of the microfilm machine whining as it produces another sheaf of photocopied ads. (The microfilm is in horrid condition, incidentally; nearly every page is marred by big deep black lines, and I have spent many hours touching these fellows up for public consumption.)

2. Why do I care? Several explanations. The ads of the 40s and 50s have a language all their own - rich, detailed, dense, with many styles ranging from painstaking illustrations to squiggly abstract drawings. (Many of the best cartoonists for the New Yorker ended up drawing ads.) They're just plain fun to look at. Illustration has disappeared from ads today; this is an art form on the way out.

The ads are all genial lies, of course, full of the usual promises, but by the standards of today the lies seem so cheerful. We often mistake the past as sunny and happy because the only artifacts around to testify uncontested are imperishable items from popular culture - movies, songs, ads, etc. The cheer isn't entirely forced - the post-war period was a Golden Age of sorts, with unparalleled prosperity and social mobility; it's natural that the ads reflect some of that.

Which doesn't entirely explain why half these mascots appear psychotic.