Today, it's
another thing that's been in the "Scanned" folder for too long, something I never knew what to do with - unless I realized ah, yes, tuck it away in the Hiatus folder, then pull it out a year later and sigh what do I do with this anyway.
Important? Noooo. But it's the small details that help you reconstruct a culture.
I have to admit I never liked the show.
Don’t dislike it, but it just never clicked. I am quite alone in that judgment. It ran from 1935 to 1956. America loved these guys! Me, I just wonder what Fibber did for money. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence he had any form of employment whatsoever. And his fibs weren’t big pathological whoppers that got him in trouble every ep.
The game sets forth the rules:
So it’s Mad Libs, of a sort. That’ll be fun and amusing for a while! Good thing there’s not a laborious, detailed set of rules that -
Oh
AND THERE’S MORE
Make sure to customize your cards to let your friends and neighbors know they’ve been going on and on about something everyone’s frankly weary of hearing about.
We begin.
I’m a bit dismayed to learn that Fibber goes along with the BS story about the Green Hornet being a bad guy:
"He was leading Jane’s new washing machine around on a leash"
"Jane, why aren’t you laughing?"
"How many of these cards are about my washing machine? That’s the fourth so far!"
Mollie said “Tain't funny, McGee” a lot, and for good reason.
How many of these were ever completed, we’ll never know. I suspect that people just read the cards and said to hell with the scoring.
We resume our study of ads, and now it's . . .
I’m a big fan of Pepto-Bismol, but I never put any trust in the tablets. Sorry. You need to glug down a couple shots of the real stuff. There are lots of ads in the collection for the pills, but they’re not as interesting as the guggable goop. Here’s the thing: the stuff works! Everyone knew it did the job.
There were a few of these, all featuring an unnamed demon who flew into the world with the sole intention of stabbing you in the stomach with a trident.
Hospital-tested! That doesn’t mean anything.
The new style of character design: the Squat Blob-Man with a beak. It would eventually migrate to greeting cards, where it would live for years. The Inspector in the Pink Panther cartoons came from the same design.
Note how MAD modern life was:
TRAVEL
Don't envy your friends. They're about to barf.
POLITICS
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this. It probably worked then because people didn’t take it personally. Everyone would take it personally today.
It does seem to assume a certain set of beliefs in the viewer, doesn’t it?
THAT GUY
It’s that guy!
But . . . who is he? David Huddleston, I'm sure.
GREEN? LIKE HOW YOU FEEL?
This is a cultural literacy test. Or was, once. Let’s get the second issue out of the way: yes, there was Green Pepto-Bismol.
Took me a few beats, but then I remembered.
Another popular Señor Wences character was the gruff-voiced "Pedro", a disembodied head in a box. Señor Wences was forced suddenly to invent the character when his regular, full-sized dummy was destroyed during a 1936 train accident en route to Chicago. Pedro would either "speak" from within the closed box, or speak with moving lips – simply answering "s'awright" ("it's all right") – when the performer opened the box's front panel with his free hand to ask questions of Pedro.
You want to draw a crowd? Walk around talking out loud about the Hershey blurts, and people will be drawn to you, and wish to touch the hem of your garment to be cured.
All of these are more interesting than their current campaign . . . whatever that is. Can you recall any recent commercials for the stuff?
