Soggy, Mushy and Toughy

Who needs Iron Man or The Dark Knight, when you can watch Snap, Crackle and Pop battle their evil counterparts?

Posted By: Paul - Mon Dec 01, 2008 - Comments (6)
Category: Business, Advertising, Food, Movies, Cartoons, Children, 1930s, Fictional Monsters

Butlin’s Crazy House

Old amusement park attractions are inevitably weird.

Consider the Crazy House once to be found in Felixstowe, UK.

These old postcard images come from the Flickr set of a fellow who uses the handle Photoaf.

The house was part of a Butlin's Amusement Park. For the history of the founder, Billy Butlin, eventually knighted for his recreational achievements, visit here.

Wouldn't you have loved to experience this park during its heyday, some seventy years ago?

Posted By: Paul - Tue Nov 25, 2008 - Comments (4)
Category: Architecture, Buildings and Other Structures, Entertainment, Fairs, Amusement Parks, and Resorts, History, Photography and Photographers, Surrealism, Foreign Customs, 1930s

Follies of the Mad Men #42

Yet another "disease" that Madison Avenue tried to foist upon the public.


[From Fortune magazine for December 1936.]

Posted By: Paul - Mon Nov 10, 2008 - Comments (5)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Furniture, 1930s, Disease

Aristocrats of Fashion

Do you have enough Bemberg rayon clothes in your wardrobe? If not, watch this!

(But be warned! Only a partial video remains to us down the ages. You'll never get to see the implied all-rayon wedding.)

Posted By: Paul - Tue Sep 30, 2008 - Comments (3)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Fashion, 1930s, 1940s

Follies of the Mad Men #31

Product placement in entertainment media is nothing new. Here's how the classic fairytale of Cinderella can be improved by the addition of a Chevrolet.

Posted By: Paul - Mon Sep 29, 2008 - Comments (2)
Category: Business, Advertising, Movies, Cartoons, Myths and Fairytales, Marriage, 1930s, Dance, Cars

Dion Fortune

Collecting novels of the fantastic as I do, I eventually and inevitably came across those of Dion Fortune, and bought a few. To this day, they remain untracked by my eyes. Nonetheless, I was sensitized to her name, and could spot her non-fiction selection Psychic Self-Defence readily on the shelf of a used-book store and snatch it up. A bargain at $5.00, I'm sure!

I haven't read it yet, but I'm much looking forward to learning how to protect myself against various types of intrusive mind assaults. Sample a few pages yourselves below.

And thanks to Google Books, you can read the whole thing online here.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Sep 26, 2008 - Comments (8)
Category: New Age, Paranormal, Self-help Schemes, Psychology, Books, 1930s

World D

Here's another strange book I purchased but have not yet read. The real author is Joseph K. Heydon, using the pen-name of Hal Trevarthen. Time has swallowed up all details related to Heydon and his book, leaving us only with the text itself.


Here's the description from the amazingly ugly dustjacket.


Here's the title page, followed by a sample of the actual bafflegab inside.


Posted By: Paul - Thu Sep 11, 2008 - Comments (11)
Category: Aliens, Eccentrics, Government, Inventions, Literature, Books, Science Fiction, Writers, Nature, New Age, Paranormal, Pop Culture, Science, Psychology, Self-help Schemes, Foreign Customs, 1930s, Yesterday’s Tomorrows

Julian Eltinge

Every election year, politicians seek to invoke a mythical Golden Age, when life was simpler and more wholesome. Take the Edwardian Era in America, for instance, when the moral fiber of the country was still unpolluted--

--and when a drag queen like Julian Eltinge was a top attraction in high society and popular culture alike.

Face it: life was never any different.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Aug 06, 2008 - Comments (3)
Category: Celebrities, Eccentrics, Entertainment, Government, History, Historical Figure, Hollywood, Sexuality, Gender, Gender-bending, Men, Theater and Stage, Vaudeville, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s

Magic Cheese Chips

They admit it's "decidedly unusual," but I think it would sure beat stuffing envelopes. "Simply drop into hot grease and they're ready to eat -- big, tasty, crispy, delicious!" Question: What makes them magic?

From the July, 1934 issue of Modern Mechanix. (via J-Walk)

Posted By: Alex - Tue Aug 05, 2008 - Comments (3)
Category: Business, Advertising, Food, 1930s

The White Castle Experiment

If you haven't yet seen Super Size Me, it's worth renting. In it, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock makes himself the subject of an experiment to find out what will happen to his body if he only eats McDonald's fast food for 30 days. Predictably, his health deteriorates, his cholesterol skyrockets, he grows lethargic, and his waistline expands dramatically.

However, the idea of conducting a fast-food diet experiment wasn't original to Spurlock. That honor goes to Jesse McClendon, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, who in 1930 fed a volunteer a diet of only White Castle hamburgers for 13 weeks. From the U of M Medical Bulletin:


Flesche survived his ordeal without developing any significant health problems. The owner of White Castle interpreted this to mean that a hamburger diet is healthy and heavily promoted the experiment in advertisements. Flesche, however, who had once been a hamburger lover, developed a permanent aversion to them. He never willingly ate a hamburger again.

Posted By: Alex - Mon Aug 04, 2008 - Comments (0)
Category: Food, Experiments, 1930s