These days you hear a lot about the decline of print culture, and I think we all know what’s at fault: not enough mail-order products being sold in contemporary magazines. As a favour to all current and future publishing houses, I have taken the liberty of listing and ranking everything for sale in a 1977 issue of Archie, so that we all may learn by example.
1. 100 Little Dolls for $2.00
“Little dolls” are definitely one of those things where you can either own 0 or you can own 100, and there is nothing and no one that exists in between. Frankly, I’ve already lived my life for too long in the first camp, and I think it’s time I explore the second.
The best part of this ad is how much stock the copywriter puts in the HARD SYNTHETIC RUBBER and HIGH-IMPACT SYNTHETIC PLASTIC that these dolls are made of. The worst part is probably how determinedly they assume that I’m buying these for a child somewhere. Can’t a girl buy 100 HARD SYNTHETIC RUBBER dolls for her personal use without being made to feel self-conscious?
“I can’t wait to see if these dolls are all you say they are.”
Neither can I, sirs. Neither can I.
2. A 32-Page Upholstery and Decorating School Brochure
What liberal arts grad hasn’t considered putting their dreams aside and settling into a stable career in upholstery decorating? Anyone that isn’t immediately sold on this just needs to take a closer look at the graduate testimonials:
That’s Lorenzo Du Pont, everybody! A satisfied customer, indeed.
3. Nature’s Mysterious Hungry Plant
This is definitely the perfect thing to keep on one’s bedside table to sexually intimidate prospective suitors.
PLANT EATS MEAT
But will it eat ground meat from my fingers?
WILL IT EVER!
4. Super Bodybuilding Course
The fellows at my local Cross-Fit gym will be green with envy! The testimonials for this bodybuilding course might not be as good as the ones in the upholstery-decorating ad, but they’re darn close:
“I find that my power has doubled. In sports I am a winner in everything I do.”
You give hope to the masses, B. Daniels.
5. Junior Sales Club of America (J.S.C.A) Membership
I really do want to like this, but I’m bothered by how seductively the J.S.C.A. Jolly Giant is looking at me with his button nose and lace-up booties. Still, the prizes they’re offering are pretty great! Sometimes I wish that university more worked like this, and that I could trade in my heretofore-useless biogeography credits for a spin fishing outfit or a 4-player croquet set.
6. “Blair Products” Dealer Kit
Stop it with your home business plans, 1977 Archie comic! It’s like you know how poor I am! Also, “Tim Newcomer” is by far the worst nom de plume in this whole ding-dong issue. If you can’t put in the effort to come up with a “Lorenzo Du Pont” or better, then I really have no desire to do business with you.
7. Sea Monkeys
Have you ever bought sea monkeys? They are so, so disappointing. I definitely owned them at a couple of points during my childhood, and at no point was I ever satisfied with my purchase.
According to Wikipedia, I was not alone! Sea monkeys–originally called “brine shrimp”–were:
“[…] Intensely marketed in comic books using illustrations by the comic-book illustrator Joe Orlando. These showed humanoid animals that bear no resemblance to the crustaceans. Many purchasers were disappointed by the dissimilarity, and by the short lifespan of the animals.”
This is possibly the truest sentence I have ever read in my life. Seven-year-old me was disappointed by the dissimilarity, and by the short lifespan of the animals. Still, I gotta give some bonus points for the groovy drawing of the smiling, genital-free Sea Monkey nuclear family in the ad, and for the honest use of quotation marks in the sentence “they can be ‘trained’!”
Plus, even knowing what I now know about sea monkeys, there’s a little part of me that wants to order some right now and hatch them in my bathtub.
8. Start Your Own “Grit” Business
Enough, Archie Comic, stop knowing my secrets! I am both broke and anti-social and I’d thank you to stop pointing it out.
I will not be buying this.
Tags: advertising, archie comics, comics, money, paula duhatschek, vintage ads
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…what exactly was GRIT selling? Office piecework? A cult? Literally nothing?
“America’s Greatest Family Weekly Newspaper,” I think.
I’ve never heard of it, but I’ve also never heard of any of America’s other family weekly newspapers, so I can’t really argue against it being the greatest of them.
yep, it was a “newspaper”. My grandma had a subscription. I think it had the prince valiant comic strip.
It’s a newspaper that still exists to this day! Somewhere I have writer’s guidelines! I was hoping to sell them enough short articles to buy my whole wish list from the Johnson Smith catalog, but life intervened.
My 7 year old daughter asks for the stuff from 70s to 90s Archie comics at least once a week.
Oh man, sea monkeys stole my innocence.
This article is totally giving me flashbacks to being a confused and socially awkward child, whose hippie-ish parents would never buy her anything cool or let her watch TV. Those Archie comics ads (that I read at my friend’s house) definitely left me with the unformed but very strong sense that buying things would change my whole life for the better.
That body builder ad also reminds me of when I filled out some mail-order coupon for some kind of diet product, and there was a long list of checkboxes for parts of your body you were unhappy with, and I wanted to check them all, but felt like surely I couldn’t check them ALL, so I left off ankles, I think.
robotneedslove — are you my older sister?
Are you tall, blonde, and gorgeous? Do you look like a party girl/model, but are actually an amazing weirdo introvert, in the best way? Cause if so, then maybe I am your older sister, yes. Haaaaaay girl clean the kitchen, ok? (My sister lives with me.)
Sisters are the best.
You are definitely not my sister, but I might possibly be you.
WHAT OTHER PARTS OF MY BODY WILL MY NEW MUSCLES REPLACE
“She strode majestically into the room, flexing her new, toned spleen.”
I ordered those sea monkeys. From that exact ad, which ran well into the 80’s. Oh, man.
Me too, and when they didn’t work/hatch/grow/??? I pestered my mom for ages until she bought me a Sea-Monkeys set from Toys-R-Us.
ngl, I still kind of want to raise brine shrimp.
I think mine actually hatched….? I also bought the magic rock kit. I was way too impatient to find out if it worked. Who designs a child’s toy that works in geologic time?
please get triops instead! They are much bigger and funkier looking and will be much more satisfying.
in college my friends had some and gave them names like malfeasance and tabasco (you can see them, so you can name them!)
eventually, the biggest triop ATE all of the other ones and then died. We gave it a lighter fluid tissue box viking funeral send-off.
…I might get triops now, actually.
Triops are the best!! I killed mine accidentally when trying to change the water. I am still sad about it. Here are mine swimming around – https://flic.kr/p/61CAJy
I actually would like some more.
that is an awesome video. better if you imagine them going ‘wheee!’
Let me recommend a supplementary podcast – Stuff You Missed In History Class: The Dark Legacy of Sea Monkeys.
http://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/the-dark-…
yessssssss
That weirdo also invented the x-ray spex!
STICKS OF DYNAMITE WILL POP OUT OF YOUR BICEPS AND THAT ONE KID WHO’S ALWAYS PLAYING WITH HIS DAD’S ZIPPO LIGHTER FROM WWII WILL LIGHT ONE AND YOUR ARM WILL EXPLODE AND YOU’LL BE STANDING THERE WITH NOTHING LEFT OF YOUR ARM EXCEPT A SMOKING SKELETON ARM, LIKE ARNOLD AFTER THAT ONE SCENE IN TERMINATOR 2
IT WILL BE AWESOME
I hate to be the one to break it to you… but I ordered those 100 dolls when I was 9ish and they were an incredible disappointment. They were just these little plastic toy-solidery type things and even worse, there were only like 5 different kinds! Notice they never say “100 DIFFERENT dolls.”
And yes, the sea monkeys are even worse.
My revenge was I signed up to sell seeds and then never sent them the seed money. Bwahahahaha!
I’d have guessed about the toy-soldiery-ness, based on how they described the manufacturing, and also because they mentioned lifelike proportions without ever suggesting that there would be lifelike colours. But it lists eleven different doll types in the ad, so there only being about five is pretty disappointing.
Update: The internet has a picture!
There are definitely more than five types, at least in the version in this picture, but there are also a lot of repeats. Especially of the “foreign dolls,” which are about as cringe-inducing as I’d have expected.
I’m not sure why they included two Santa-and-sleigh-and-reindeer dolls, that definitely doesn’t seem like a doll that anyone would need two of.
it actually looks like it could be a lot of fun painting those up, like a warhammer 40k type thing
This is making me think about “The Indian in the Cupboard” and wondering who they’d all be if you put them in the cupboard and turned the key.
I know sea monkeys are made of brine shrimp and lies, but I can’t help kind of thinking that maybe they’re real. Maybe everyone else is lying. I have even found myself Googling them, more than once, in the hopes I would discover some grain of truth behind that picture.
Also, of course, X-Ray Specs. Look through girls’ clothes! Also through boys’! See what they don’t want you to see! Supernumerary nipples! Colostomy bags! Cesarian scars! Parasitic twins! Take off the specs, the effect continues! That one substitute teacher that you had a crush on, she has a fanged pit where her belly button should be! She comes up to you in study hall! Her breath smells like rotten meat! She whispers in your ear! “We know that you know. Keep your silence, and you’ll be spared in the upcoming Dark Apocalypse.” You never sleep again! Looking up at the stars at night, you see things writhing among them! Get a pair for your friends!
This is my absolute favorite.
It is difficult to pick a favorite part of Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet, but when issue 3 came out it was this ad on the back page that made me clutch the book to my chest and emit unearthly wails (credit).
Oh, and supposedly I once won a color-changing pen in a comic book sweepstakes… but it never arrived. Their revenge for the seed money?
one HUNDRED dolls!
did anyone else read that Oriental Trading Company catalog and just get totally mind-blown that the toys came in quantities of SEVERAL DOZEN? I so wanted 48 plastic squirt guns or something that sounded equally absurd as soon as I voiced it to my mom.
That was one of the most fun parts about working at a party supply store – getting to order & play with I mean put away neatly all the little party favor toys.
I remember being taken aback by the fact that things came in GROSSES. Like, who needs 144 of ANYTHING??
HAPPY. PROUD. WELL-PAID.
…excuse me while I go jump off a building now.
I read a pretty sweet book about old comic book ads and the items that arrived when sent away for – this one! – and it was surprisingly interesting. I also didn’t realize initially that the cover glows in the dark and it scared the crap out of me when I turned the lights off one night.
I want a hungry plant :'(
I’m 99% sure this would kill a venus fly trap almost immediately, but I really want to get one now, and name it like, Edgar, and feed it hamburger. It could live on my desk at work.
yes it will kill a Venus Fly Trap if you feed it hamburger. Guess how I know
<<not so secret killer of venus fly traps>>
I also eventually killed one using tofu as the supplement.
Number one cause of death seemed to be visitors getting all excited and “demonstrating” plants to themselves by poking the traps with a pencil to close them.
I got sea monkeys when I was younger. Single most disappointing experience of my life, even including the results of the recent UK election.
Sea monkeys: Worse Than the Tories.
Or, from the other side, ‘Tories: better than sea monkeys’. Which may be their next campaign slogan (I’ve never seen Cameron and a sea monkey in the same room, mind you. Deeply suspicious. Maybe he’ll do nothing and then die after a fortnight?)
We can only hope.
Um. . .why are we buying SO MANY DOLLS for the “cute child next door”? I side-eye you, sir.
I am still kicking myself for not ever treating myself to one of those “learn to be a professional psychic by mail” kits advertised in World Weekly News. Doing it online doesn’t have the glamor of getting educational materials on how to be psychic mailed to my house.
The prizes in the Jolly Giant sales club look remarkably like the ones I occasionally saw 15-odd years later, except for the omission of the clear plastic phone. Also, I at first thought his shoes were some kind of huge slug-like entities you could earn that would do your bidding, which would be pretty cool.
For this production of Platee, the designers openly admitted that they were trying for pure sea monkey: http://www.fouchecourt.com/fr/portfolio_page/plat…
Heavenly!
Sea monkeys! I never had any myself, but I’m pretty sure an episode of the Rugrats involved them.
There’s very little I love more than old ads, because their world is a place of wondrous, illogical possibility.
I also love really old like 1880s ads, because oh HOW DIFFERENT A CONSUMER THAN ME THESE ARE MARKETED TOWARDS.
I was looking at a paper from the 1880s the other day, and there was one spot on the front page where it just said “Read the new advertisements and remember what they tell about.”
I surely will! Thanks, kindly editors!
This will always be my favorite vintage comic book ad:
http://comiccoverage.typepad.com/photos/uncategor…
I just have so many questions! How were they shipped? *Were* they shipped – did anyone ever actually receive a monkey they bought through an ad in a comic book? How many monkeys died after being a fed an exclusive diet of lollipops? Truly, a mystery for the ages.
D-R-I-N-K
M-O-R-E
O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E
I was a member of the JSCA and I got a woodburning kit and a Polaroid camera with my sales points, or however it worked! The greeting cards were fairly decent quality for the late 70s. My mom and a bunch of neighbors and family bought cards from me and didn’t seem to be too put out by an 9 year old selling reasonably priced cards. Frankly it was better than Girl Scout cookies because I actually saw the fruits of my labor.
I also had Sea Monkeys. What a waste of money. Those growing rocks things were far more interesting and fun.
I was a member of the JSCA and I got a woodburning kit and a Polaroid camera with my sales points, or however it worked! The greeting cards were fairly decent quality for the late 70s. My mom and a bunch of neighbors and family bought cards from me and didn't seem to be too put out by an 9 year old selling reasonably priced cards. Frankly it was better than Girl Scout cookies because I actually saw the fruits of my labor.
I also had Sea Monkeys. What a waste of money. Those growing rocks things were far more interesting and fun.
I have never heard of triops and now I *must have some*. I need a tank of them in my office. This is vital.
pah! no x-ray specs or Daisy BB guns?
great piece nonetheless