The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time

[joeekaitis]

Becky Steinberg always looks forward to
her special dinner out with her gentile aunt and uncle.

 

[jasonl]

It's good to have a girl around the house

LOL.

Just lol.

And it's for a feminine product at that.

 

[everythingold]

It strikes me that people in the 50's were not prudes, like they are often depicted.

 

[jasonl]

Prudes

That was just a front.

Perfect example: Glenn Quagmire LOL.

 

[earthling177]

Thomas: the one they show in the ad is probably for use in small offices. Large companies that send out mass mailings probably have the large machine you described.

Toggles: it varied according to time and place. Obviously, when the 12 "peers" were all men, long ago, it was easier for men to get away with it. More recently, when jurors are as random as one can get (the lawyers will, of course, try to tilt the balance to the gender they're defending), women have also gotten away with murder. "Crime of passion", as it was often described, tended to get the same leeway as self-defense... it's rather easy to convince the jurors that you got home, saw your loved one in bed with other people and killed one or more people because you couldn't think. Not something we've been proud of in our history, at least not enough to advertise it to tourists ("Come to our shores and kill your spouse!")... Either way, that defense has been used in US as recently as the 50's, just take a look at the wikipedia article in the link below. And more recently, the sanitized version is called "Temporary Insanity".

Matt: I agree with Jason. All you have to do is look at the video that Toggles posted in the electric meters thread -- I really doubt that the kids came out with the choreography themselves, it's probably original to whatever movie/TV show the song originally appeared on in the 70's or so. And if you think that Marilyn Monroe's performance of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" was too much for the 60's in "Let's Make Love", you'd probably be scandalized by Mary Martin's performance in "Night and Day" (1946), which was tame by the 60's. I just wonder how much of a scandal that song was when it appeared in the 30's.

Let's Make Love version (Marilyn Monroe):
Night and Day version (Mary Martin):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_passion

 

[dirtybuck]

#15

Someone should Photoshop that pic and add a set of fangs to that monstrous little tyke.

 

[westie2]

Change the eye color and hair color to blond on that little girl and she would be from "The Village of the Damned"

 

[dirtybuck]

HUH?

I'm not quite sure I follow these odd Lysol ads. Were they TOTALLY whacked out and bothered by germs so much that people locked themselves in the bathroom or garage over them?

I'm totally surprised Joan Crawford didn't do one for them.

 

[danemodsandy]

Dirtybuck:

Lysol was pretty much part of the culture for a while there. 1950s women who used it for the purpose in the ad were taught to do that by their mothers, who'd learnt to do it twenty years before.

If anyone wonders why women were so fond of Lysol for this little job, it's very simple. Creosol, the active disinfectant ingredient in Lysol, is absolute death on motile sperm. That's right - birth control before there was legal birth control. Cheap and effective. Lehn and Fink, makers of Lysol, could not come right out and say any of this, but it was well-known to women of that time.

In a world where the Pill hadn't been invented yet, and condoms were illegal in many places, having Lysol on every grocers' shelf was probably a Godsend.

 

[little-edie]

thanks for the post....

the pig self-slicing slays me..(nyuk)