Who could imagine that a member of a species of household vermin could become so popular. Think about it...Mickey Mouse. Well how about..."Johnny Cockroach"?
Naw it seriously don't scan.
"Johnny Cockroach Peanut Butter"...yes a bit of Johnny in every jar!" Cockroach mugs plates t-shirts pull toys, and hats.
Eh,....no.
It's interesting. When Mickey came around vermin were a natural part of most households. This the turn of the 20th century. Here we're getting slowly deeper into the 21st. There are different common assumptions. One of them is we bathe now, and don't put up with creepy crawlies.
Btw the clip below from the "Mickey Mouse Club" is actually in color! This for the perhaps 400 people in the whole country that had color TV's in 1953.
Heck I didn't even see my first color set till maybe 1961. It was on display at Rockefeller Center. They were showing the proles what they were missing.
Yeah, and would keep on missing for another 15 years or so. Color TV's didn't start showing up in regular homes till the mid-1970's. Yep it was a monaural black'n white world kiddies.
...and I loved it!
Good bleeping grief! The damned things were big hot heavy, and only two stations b'cast in color. Even 'they' only had three hours of color a day. Ah the old daze when corporations paid taxes, and everybody's dad had a decent job!
Stay Tuned.
An uncle of mine had a color TV in the mid-to-late 60's. He was wealthy on account of some real estate deals that later turned sour and ruined him. The colors were a bit odd - red had a slightly orange cast to it for some reason. I kinda liked that. Color TV shouldn't look normal, it should be weird and crypto-psychedelic.
ReplyDeleteAnother uncle also had color TV, and come to think of it his business also did very well for a while, then eventually headed south. I think we're getting a general story outline here.
We were white, Anglo-Saxon & upper middle class - in a word, the Oppressor. Then somewhere along the line it all went to shit, & we wound up waiting in line at the food bank to be handed frequently rotten food by bossy volunteers with a Lady Bountiful complex. So you see it all comes out right in the end.
Well see we're all Equal after all. Yeah the 1950's/60's golden daze of economic bounty slowly as you say went south. Even as a working class colored kids I saw this.
ReplyDeleteWe had a house a car a TV and we went to Catholic school...all on my Dad's bakers salary. Of course eventually my Mom had to work, and so did my older brother, and I after school to keep us going...but we actually made it.
My brother, and sister made it into the former upper middle class which made my folks proud as heck. Me...well I was a commie pervert artist anarchist sort of kid. So here I am on Medicaid. Aw well I'm okay. Thanks for posting.
"Color TV shouldn't look normal, it should be weird and crypto-psychedelic."
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. I would like it much better that way. Color TV back in the day had a cartoon/comic book sort of look. I think it was called "compatible color" at the time. It wasn't till Sony issued the 'Trinitron" in the 1970's did things start to look "normal"...and boring.