Long before TV or radio or movies ever had any influence on them, children loved their weapons. Schoolyards, playgrounds and backyards were all strewn with slingshots, popguns and wooden rifles well before the big media companies even existed. So you can’t pin America’s obsession with guns on anybody except those Second Amendment-loving seven-year-olds who got their jollies pretending to wound, main and kill while waiting to grow up.
But let’s face it…once Big Media burst forth, it was only too happy step in and try to squeeze every last nickel out of Kid Nation’s pocket, even if it meant selling their own kid a gun.
Movies, radio and TV created heroes. Heroes carried guns. Kids, wanting to be like their heroes, also wanted to carry guns. More importantly they wanted to carry the kinds of guns that their heroes carried. That’s where Big Media stepped on up.
Enter the merchandising tie-in. In the 1930s, young fans of the Buck Rogers comic strip and movie serial could feel closer to their favorite spaceman by filling their fists with the Buck Rogers Rocket Pistol, Disintegrator Pistol or Liquid Helium Pistol.
When Westerns ruled the screen back in the 1940s and 1950s, kids could buy all kinds of six-shooters and carbines, all endorsed and promoted by big screen Western stars and characters like Red Ryder, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy and Davy Crockett. Even the littlest cowpoke, Howdy Doody, shot guns and he was a puppet.
In the 1960s, crime fighters like Dick Tracy, James Bond, The Detectives,Honey West,The Green Hornet and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. inspired all manner of sub-machine guns, Walther PPK water pistols and snub-nose .38 cap guns.
For your edification and enlightenment, we have below a commercial for one of those guns. Television itself was only about 16 years old when this spot debuted. Tough crime shows like Naked City, The Untouchables, M-Squad and Peter Gunn (gun!) were staples of the three networks’ schedules. The influence of those TV shows on this product choice and this marketing effort should be obvious to even the most casual of viewer. Ladies and Gentlemen—and, most importantly, Boys and Girls—here’s Mattel’s Tommy Burst Detective Set.
NOTE: If the actor playing the crook seems like he might be a familiar face, he is. That’s Hal Smith, best known as Otis Campbell, Mayberry’s town drunk, on The Andy Griffith Show.
Before he was known as a screenwriter, film director and a guy who couldn’t help but marry his girlfriend’s adopted daughter, Woody Allen was a nightclub comic trying to get famous.
After anonymously writing gags for showbiz columnists like Earl Wilson and TV shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour, The Tonight Show, Caesar’s Hour and Candid Camera, Woody traded on his funny bone to become a funny face in print media, especially in advertising.
For example, Woody Allen hung his mug out in a series of Smirnoff Vodka ads. He later turned that experience into a monologue on his 1968 Standup Comic live performance record.
Most of these ads appeared in Playboy, whose readers liked pretty girls like actress Monique van Vooren and smart comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl.
And Playboy’s various features and interviews focusing on Woody Allen allowed the comedian’s voice and point of view to emerge.
Soon, other advertisers wanted a piece of Woody Allen’s face. Foster Grant sunglasses was one that took a shine to Woody Allen.
It was only a matter of time before mainstream magazines like The New Yorker and Esquire and Life featured Woody’s writing and promoted his projects.
Woody Allen may have been a sophisticated comedian doing adult material, but he was careful not to leave comic book reading kids behind.
From a comic to the comics: For eight years, “Woody Allen” appeared in the funny pages as a daily comic strip (though it was neither written nor drawn by Woody Allen).
In the end, it all helped. After over sixty years in show business and nearly fifty films, Woody Allen’s longest-lasting creation–the image of Woody Allen himself–endures.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably caught onto the fact that I’m interested in movie posters and the artists and designers who create them.
I’m sure it all started when I was kid, standing outside one movie theater or another, staring at the poster for that week’s biggest blockbuster or most disreputable exploitation picture, intrigued by all the promises (some, never fulfilled) made by the words and pictures on those big, one-sheet posters.
Much later, after I’d found my way into show business, I began to see and even participate in the marketing of movies and television shows. I learned that not all audiences are the alike. You couldn’t make just one poster. You had to make different posters for different demographic groups, different neighborhoods, different cities and even different countries.
And so, I thought it might be interesting to take a quick survey here of one recently released film’s portfolio of different posters. The movie in question is Quentin Tarantino’s latest, Inglourious Basterds.
We start with the key art most familiar to American audiences…
Here’s a kinder, gentler alternate version for the USA…
No photography, no faces for the United Kingdom…
A strong promise of violence for the audiences in Russia…
Brad Pitt as pulp hero for the people of Poland…
Mélanie Laurent takes center stage for Hungary…
A Bob Peak-style montage for Portugal…
Echoes of the Kill Bill movies for Japanese Tarantino fans…
Invaded by the Nazis in World War II, Slovenia gets this subdued treatment…
You Bet Your Life was a comedy quiz show hosted by the legendary comedian Groucho Marx. After decades of stage and film work as part of the Marx Brothers (A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Duck Soup), Groucho found huge success in radio and television with You Bet Your Life. The show started on ABC radio in 1947, before jumping to CBS in 1949. A year later, Groucho moved his Bet to NBC radio and television where it was simulcast for eleven years, airing (mostly) on Wednesdays at 9pm.
Over the years, You Bet Your Life had lots of sponsors, including Elgin American watches, DeSoto automobiles, Lux Liquid, White Rain Shampoo, Geritol, Old Gold cigarettes, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer and, of course, Kellogg’s of Battle Creek.
Here, from 1955, is a print ad for a Kellogg’s-sponsored You Bet Your Life. A sample, if you will, of integrated marketing in a pre-synergy universe. Two pop culture legends, Groucho Marx and Tony the Tiger, share magazine ad space.
A meeting of two titans and, yet, it looks like Tony’s people were better brand managers. Aside from the NBC microphone and the stealth show title (”You bet your life they’re Gr-r-reat!”), Groucho’s show gets no benefit. No show logo, no tune-in information, no check your local listings advisory. Tony the Tiger and his damned corn flakes are soaking up all the cream.
Or, maybe, Groucho simply didn’t need the help. This ad would have hit about eight years into Mr. Marx’s fourteen-year run as a primetime powerhouse. Tony the Tiger, created by Chicago ad man Leo Burnett, had only been around three years.
