CSotD: Memories of Mad Ambivalence
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Over at the Mad Magazine blog, they've been having various staffers pick their favorite back covers as part of the magazine's 60th Anniversary.
So far, the choices had been ones that came after I'd stopped reading Mad, but this one is well-imprinted on my memory. The artist is Frank Frazetta, most of whose unequalled, astonishing work is in a whole other genre, but who is spot-on in this spoof of the long-running, iconic "Breck Girl" ads. (Which, as noted in the obit linked to his name here, earned him a gig doing the poster for Woody Allen's "What's New Pussycat?")
For comparison, here's a 1964 Breck ad, which I found at a site those who love vintage 60s-70s ads might want to go play around on.
Media nearly half a century ago was a great deal less narrowly targeted. In fact, in the talk I used to give at Rotary luncheons and other stops on the rubber chicken circuit back when I was seeking sponsorships for my newspapers-in-education program, I'd point out that, when the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, they shared the bill with Frank Gorshin, the cast of "Oliver" and Two-Ton Tessie O'Shea, which is why they called it a "variety show."
As I would note in that speech, families gathered around the hearth in colonial times not out of love but because it was the source of heat and light. And we gathered around Ed Sullivan in the Good Old Days because we owned one TV and, since most houses had only one TV and there were only a handful of networks, most of the programming was, of necessity, shotgunned at Mom, Dad, Bud and Sis.
With cheaper TVs, then the cable explosion and then the Internet, audience fragmented to the point where 14-year-old boys no longer knew the lyrics to Broadway musicals, nor, for the most part, would they be assailed with Beautiful Hair Breck ads.
(The point, in that presentation, being that, as kids gravitated away from newspapers and into more sharply targeted, demographically microtomed media, they were no longer grounded in their communities, and an American 14-year-old today knows more about another 14-year-old in Japan or Australia than about the 30-year-old who lives across the street. I still feel that decline of civic engagement is a loss.)
Anyway, not only were the Breck ads based on a decades-long well-branded series, but they were in both my 17-year-old sister's magazines and in most general interest magazines as well. A 14-year-old boy might have had no interest in the product, but he'd instantly recognize Frazetta's pitch-perfect send-up.
I also think that broad base of media input heightened our ambivalence about the Beatles and our attraction to a magazine whose fan base included a huge number of 14-year-old boys but which was written by middle-aged, fairly socially conservative men.
We watched Alan King on Sullivan, for instance, and he made fun of the Beatles. We didn't have this sense that our culture was sacrosanct and that anybody that ribbed us was The Enemy.
I'd say that, by October, 1964, we were becoming more at ease with the Beatle haircut, but we certainly weren't wearing our hair that way ourselves and, in fact, we were pretty suspicious of anything too fashionable, maybe moreso in a rural mining town but I think fairly universally.
So it's not that surprising that we got a laugh out of Mad Magazine's ongoing jokes about long hair and crazy music.
And, honestly, I don't remember whether I stopped reading the magazine a few years later because their social criticism began to overlap into politics and take on a similar whiff to Al Capp's hostility to the left, or simply because I was no longer 14 years old.
However, I suspect it was more of the latter, since 1964 was about when I was given a subscription to "Punch," which I kept up through most of college.
We'll talk about "Punch" another time.
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