Advertising at its finest... :-(

[V.C. Brunswick]

My favorite is the off-the-shelf Smith-Miller toy truck in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)

 

[LizzieMaine]

You can find a lot of this kind of stuff in two-reel comedies where every penny counted. Note young Chubby here advertising a certain heavily advertised national brand of flour on his apron in the Our Gang short "Helping Grandma."

Or Stymie getting a snootful of, not just limburger cheese, but Kraft Limburger Cheese.

The rise of high-resolution video will make spotting this type of thing even easier -- once you start looking at movies of the Era you'll be astounded by how much product placement was going on.

 

[Fading Fast]

...The rise of high-resolution video will make spotting this type of thing even easier -- once you start looking at movies of the Era you'll be astounded by how much product placement was going on.

Great point. Last year, we finally retired our 30 year old TV (bought in '85) and bought a new Samsung whose picture clarity is (at least) 10 times what the old one was. I wonder if that is why I noticed the Apache Beer placement in "Petrified Forest" for the first time in a movie I've seen several times before.

And just as a side note, I have thought about that movie every day since seeing it again last week as it raises some timeless philosophical / cultural / social issues in a powerfully thought-provoking way that stays with you. That is, for me, one definition of a great movie.

 

[2jakes]

The BB Gun that never was....
until Hollywood came along and said otherwise.

Red Ryder Model by Daisy.
Originally never had a compass or sundial.

Buck Jones #107 BY Daisy. (1934)
With compass & sundial.



In the movie, “A Christmas Story”, (1983)
Jean Shepard described the Red Ryder as having
a compass & sundial.

Special versions had to be made for the movie.
Later, limited editions were made available by Daisy Co.

I have the Buck Jones #107 & the Red Ryder “special”.

There’s no comparison in material & quality.
The Buck Jones rifle is far superior which is amazing
in that it is a product of the “depression” era.
Perhaps Lizzie can enlightened us.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Red Ryder gun was introduced in 1940 and widely advertised in comic books and other kid-oriented publications starting that year and continuing thruout the 1940s, as a licensed outgrowth of the Red Ryder comic strip which began in 1938.

Jean Shepherd never yearned for a Red Ryder gun as a child. He was born in 1921 and was nineteen years old when the gun was introduced -- a bit past the age of coveting such a Christmas present, and only a couple of years away from getting drafted into the Army and being given a real gun. The Buck Jones gun was introduced in 1934, when Shepherd was thirteen years old, and he might, conceivably have been interested in such a present, although 13 is a bit old for playing cowboy. But he undoubtedly would have been aware of the Buck Jones gun -- it was as widely advertised as the Red Ryder would be later on, and he would have seen and noticed and remembered the ads.

In any event, the Red Ryder strip was still being published and the Red Ryder gun was still being sold in the mid-1960s when Shepherd first wrote the story of the Christmas gun, but Buck Jones had been dead and forgotten for over twenty years -- he was killed at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston in 1942. That would likely have been one factor in his decision to use the Red Ryder gun in his story -- the other being that, in a very subtle way that's hard to explain, "Red Ryder" is, in itself, a funnier name than "Buck Jones."

Shepherd, despite projecting himself as a spontaneous storyteller, in fact worked out all his material very, very carefully, so there's no question in my mind that he made a deliberate editorial choice in coming up with the idea of "a Red Ryder repeating range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time." Substitute "Buck Jones" for "Red Ryder" and it's just not as funny.

 

[2jakes]

Thank you Lizzie.
You are a wealth of knowledge & information and I’m the better for it.


The name "Buck Jones” reminds me of this character.

Space arsenal courtesy of the Daisy Co. from Plymouth.

 

[ChrisB]

Shepherd, despite projecting himself as a spontaneous storyteller, in fact worked out all his material very, very carefully, so there's no question in my mind that he made a deliberate editorial choice in coming up with the idea of "a Red Ryder repeating range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time." Substitute "Buck Jones" for "Red Ryder" and it's just not as funny.

I used to listen to Jean Shepherd on WOR back in the 70s. Although he insisted his stories were fiction, some of the places and people in his stories were real, or thinly veiled versions of reality. He lived for a while not far from me, and I saw several performances he gave in Clinton NJ.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep, "Hohman, Indiana" was actually Hammond, Indiana, which actually had a "Warren G. Harding School," where a "Miss Shields" was one of the teachers, and a Jack "Flick" Flickinger was one of Shepherd's fellow students. There was a lot of reality in the stories he told -- but he left a whole lot out, like the fact that his lovable "Old Man" abandoned the family to run off with his secretary. I think the fact that his real life had so much disappointment, frustration and anger in it compelled him to create a world in his stories where things could go the way he wanted them to go. Shepherd went to great lengths to obscure, distort, or bury many aspects of his real life, to the point where it's impossible to know exactly where the real man ended and the fictional stories began.

And as far as advertising goes, Shepherd -- despite all his on-air cynicism about The Boys -- was a very very effective pitchman. Listen to his old programs today and listen to him doing the commercials, and you'll find yourself wanting to "make the scene at the Paperbook Gallery," or hungry for a "Prexy's hamburger, the hamburger with a college education."