Crazes of the Era

[LizzieMaine]

A few to get it started --

FADS OF THE ERA

1920
The Gumps

1921
Babe Ruth
Rudolph Valentino

1922
Coueism

1923
Radio
Marathon dancing
Crossword Puzzles
Mah jong
King Tut

1924
Slave bracelets
Flagpole sitting

1925
Walking races

1926
Peaches and Daddy

1927
Charles Lindbergh

1928
The talkies

1929
Bubble Gum
Colored nail polish
Yo-yos
Rudy Vallee
Movie musicals

1930
Amos 'n' Andy
Technicolor


1931
"Tom Thumb" (miniature) golf
Father Coughlin

1932
The Irish Sweepstakes
Reducing diets

1933
Technocracy
The Gay Nineties
"Vas you dere, Sharlie?"
Beer gardens

1934
The Dionne Quintuplets
Shirley Temple
Joe Penner
Townsend Clubs
"Anthony Adverse"

1935
Chain letters
Monopoly
Huey Long

1936
"The Music Goes Round and Round"
Knock-knock jokes.
Swing music
"Gone With The Wind"

1937
Saddle shoes

1938
Panda bears

1939
Superman
Goldfish swallowing
Two World's Fairs

1940
"Confucius Say" jokes
"Who's Yehudi?"

 

[Shangas]

I had no idea Confucius Say jokes were that old!! I love them.

Mahjong was HUGE in the 1920s (a lot of things Oriental were very popular in the 1920s, for reasons I never understood).

It's been years since I've played MJ.

 

[Fading Fast]

My Dad use to tell me that there was a miniature golf craze in the early 1930s (maybe started late 1920s) to the point that there were small miniature golf courses on what-had-been vacant lots everywhere. I can't pin it down to a year (even with a Google search) as my Dad is long since gone and he always just said, the early 30s.

Also, I noticed you mentioned Superman - did Batman create a craze when he came out or was he slow to become popular?

 

[LizzieMaine]

My Dad use to tell me that there was a miniature golf craze in the early 1930s (maybe started late 1920s) to the point that there were small miniature golf courses on what-had-been vacant lots everywhere. I can't pin it down to a year (even with a Google search) as my Dad is long since gone and he always just said, the early 30s.

Also, I noticed you mentioned Superman - did Batman create a craze when he came out or was he slow to become popular?

The miniature golf fad was a byproduct of the Depression -- a number of closed neighborhood movie theatres in various cities were turned into mini-golf operations, and the idea spread very fast thru 1931. Before long, not only were courses being set up in vacant lots, some desperate souls were turning their front dooryards into mini-golf operations.

Superman attained fad status because there'd never been anything like him -- and because he had a distinctly populist touch. If you go back and read his earliest adventures, he was presented as a squinty-eyed Slavic-looking left-wing character right off a WPA mural, and his enemies were profiteering businessmen, sinister industrialists, and corrupt politicians. He was the perfect superhero for the CIO era.

It's important to note, though, that the Superman fad didn't really begin until he began appearing in newspapers. Comic books were considered disreputable trash at this early point, and adults wouldn't be seen reading them -- but everybody, of all ages, read the funny pages. When Superman turned up on the same page with Mandrake and Flash Gordon, he really took off. He got a radio show in 1940, and by then everybody knew who he was.

Batman, on the other hand, while better-plotted and better-drawn than Superman had no particularly unique point of view -- there had been hard-fisted masked avengers with playboy secret identities in the pulps and on the radio for years, and he didn't bring anything particularly distinctive to the game. He didn't get a newspaper strip until the mid-forties, and never had his own radio show. He didn't become an actual fad until the "camp" craze of 1966, when the Adam West TV show presented him as a smirking parody of the superhero genre.

 

[Stanley Doble]

What about Kewpie dolls? They were a fad of the twenties that hung on and on, I believe carnivals were still giving away Kewpie dolls as prizes ten years later.

Later.......... Did a quick search, was surprised to find Kewpies date to 1909 and are still being made. I had an idea they were a fad of the twenties, guess I was wrong.

 

[F. J.]

That reminds me of a song . . .

I had no idea Confucius Say jokes were that old!! I love them.
[...]

Guy Lombardo And His Royal Canadians with "Confucius Say," November 1939.
[video=youtube;23JYNCe6J2Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23JYNCe6J2Q[/video]

 

[Stearmen]

Wing Walking! Air Races, 1929 Cleveland over 100,000 spectators attended the first day! The country had airplane fever. [video=youtube;VKCkAJZ38UQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKCkAJZ38UQ[/video]

 

[DecoDame]

How big was Dick Tracy back in the day? When did that peak?

I love saddle shoes and I wear them, but I know that most people associate it with a 50s teenager/cheerleader look, so I'm aware that I'm a little old (to them) to be wearing such things. Or they think I need a poodle skirt to go with it. I want to have a flyer about their history as a casual/sporty shoe to hand out as I pass.

I suppose, though, if we worried about public approval or understanding about our vintage clothes we wouldn't wear any at all, so...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Dick Tracy probably hit his peak between 1942 and 1947 -- that was the era in which all of the classic "grotesque" villians first appeared. The most popular storyline in the history of the strip was the "Flattop" continuity in 1944-45, which became a national mania.

Saddle shoes in the Era became a fad with the collegiate crowd, but quickly became a popular utlity shoe for housewives, factory workers, and other women who were on their feet. They were the most popular shoe of this type with women across the board until the rise of the penny loafer in the mid-forties.

Saddles in the '30s were almost always *brown* and white, with a coral-colored rubber sole. Black and white existed, but was far less common until the late fifties.

 

[DecoDame]

...Saddles in the '30s were almost always *brown* and white, with a coral-colored rubber sole. ..

Exactly what I have.

Thanks for the lowdown on Mr. Tracy. (Huh, now I'm wondering about the origins of "lowdown". It's a never ending cycle of curiosity.)

 

[Nobert]

I don't know if Abie's Irish Rose would count as a craze, specifically, but a head-scratching phenomenon for the critics, anyway.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Quite a lot of the ethnic-Jewish characterizations that popped up in the mid-to-late twenties owed a lot to "Abie." There was a series of "Izzy Murphy" movie comedies at Warner Bros. which played on the same collision of Irish and Jewish stereotypes, along with Max Davidson's series of Hal Roach shorts. And quite likely "The Goldbergs" wouldn't have come to radio in 1929 if "Abie" hadn't made such a big impression.

 

[Talbot]

The 'Whodunit'?

Perhaps an honourable mention (but not really a craze) to bouncing ball cartoons.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles started as fads and kept going. Bridge and canasta too.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Bridge was huge during the worst years of the Depression -- the ultimate middle-class pastime at a time when the middle-class was hanging onto its status by its fingernails. Bridge expert Ely Culbertson was a major celebrity in the early thirties, often appearing on radio and in movie shorts, and did more than anybody to popularize the fad.

Canasta became popular in the postwar era in the same circles which had boosted bridge twenty years before -- for much of the fifties it was the most popular card game in the Western Hemisphere.

Another big card-playing fad was the Gin Rummy craze of 1939-40. Gin first became popular with the Hollywood crowd, and the suggestion of show-biz glitz coupled with the fact that anybody could learn to play it in a few minutes caused to it spread extremely fast.

 

[Two Types]

In the UK in the late 1920s and early 1930s there was a fashion for horseriding. The rise in car ownership among the middle classes meant people were getting less exercise and filled the void with horse-riding. This appears to have led to the spread of equestrian fashions into the mainstream.

 

[1930artdeco]

How about the Sunday drive? And speaking of collegiate kids, what about the raccoon tail on the antennae or on a stick?

Mike

 

[CONELRAD]

Raccoon coats and ukuleles. The ukulele certainly had its heyday in the 1920s with Ukulele Ike, Wendell Hall, Johnny Marvin, and all the rest.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The raccoon tails, ukuleles, and all such things fit in with the whole general "jazz" fad of the early-to-mid twenties. The word "jazz" in 1924 didn't mean what it means today, or even what it meant in 1937. The word was most widely used, instead, to refer to what might best be called "hokum" -- the real "jazzbo" of the twenties was a skinny, pimply-faced white college-age boy in a loud checked sport coat, a straw hat, and a novelty bow tie. With a raccoon coat and a ukulele stowed in his cut-down Model T roadster with comic sayings painted on the sides.

A jazzbo was a step up from a cake-eater in the jargon of the day, but not by much.

 

[Fading Fast]

Didn't the Polo coat - the big, camel hair, raglan sleeve with a belt model take off in this period as well?