ADVERTISING HISTORY WEBBED
The J.W. Hartman Center at Duke University has received a grant from Ameritech to place a digitalized exhibit, "The Emergence of Advertising, 1850-1920" on the Web. When completed, the display will include about 8,000 illustrations. For further information, check out: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/ads. The Hartman Archive has also recently received a substantial file concerning advertising for Sprint as well as other materials.
SLY SHOPS
by Patrick O'Donnell
[Ed. Note: Dr. Patrick O'Donnell is Chairperson of MSU's English Department. He recently accompanied a group organized by the Dean's Community Council of MSU's College of Arts and Letters to the Shaw Festival (one of North America's most outstanding seasonal theater programs) in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario (recently voted Canada's loveliest small city). The following is quoted from his preview comments on The Shop on Sly Corner by William Persey, a.k.a. William Persey Smith. Set in a somewhat disreputable antique and jewelry store, this mid-1940's play typifies the literary view of at least a certain type of retail marketing as O'Donnell points out.]
"Now about all that junk. It is an antique shop, after all, and antique shops are often filled with ill-assorted objects; in fact, shops packed with dusty, exotic, strange, and ancient objects are the kinds of spaces often portrayed in tales of mystery, whether on stage, screen, or in novels. My favorite is the mother of all literary antique shops, Dickens' old curiosity shop, full of rusted suits of armor, strange bottles containing mysterious objects, foreign coins; it stands as a predecessor to Krook's rag shop in Dickens' mature masterpiece, Bleak House, where the foul Krook would die spectacularly of spontaneous combustion. But there is also those shops of Hollywood cinema that would have echoed in the minds of those in the audience at the Booth Theatre when The Shop at Sly Corner premiered: the notions shop of Ernest Lubitsch's 1940 hit, The Shop Around the Corner, a period comedy set in Budapest (there's the Eastern European element) starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan: or the back street shop of Hitchcock's 1936 Sabotage, based on Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent—a dark corner where anarchists ply their trade. The Shop at Sly Corner certainly bears all of the connotations of these literary and cinematic shops full of secrets, and the resonances of the recent war can be perceived in the closed space of the play: all of those backrooms where German spies exchanged coded messages or tortured their victims behind the respectable shopfronts of the laundry, or the tobacconist, or the antiquarian.
BARBIE'S CHECKERED PAST
Those unfortunate few who missed ABC's program June 11, 1998 on The Secret Life of Barbie, listen up! Barbie's 40th birthday was the occasion for the ABC Special Report. The reporter, Robert Krulwich found that Barbie had descended from a German ancestor, Lilli, a 1940s calling card for sex. Apparently, Ruth Handler, Barbie's inventor, was trying to convince her husband, and Mattel partner, that the company should produce a "grown up" looking doll for little girls. On a trip to Germany, she saw the doll of her imagination. It turns out that the Lilli doll was a present bought by a young man along with a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of wine taken to a prospective date's house as a signal that he was interested in more than just dinner!
The motivation research, conducted by Ernst Dichter, added to Barbie's checkered past for the ABC reporter. Dichter ran focus groups which determined that the best promotional approach was to tell mothers that Barbie would teach their daughters how to dress and coif to get a husband! Mattel paid an unheard of amount $500,000 to sponsor the entire season of Disney's Mickey Mouse Club. Of course the early ad pitch may have led to her 1970s disgrace when feminists charged her with every crime against womanhood from illegal measurements (leading to unrealistic body images among both sexes) to indecent exposure! Had the feminists only known about her German ancestor, Barbie may have been added to some of the undergarment bonfires of the day!
Today, Barbie has made a triumphant comeback (7,200 dolls are sold per hour). She is more career-oriented in today's market—her wardrobe-minded cousin exists side-by-side with Teacher Barbie, Vet Barbie, and Olympic Skater Barbie (wolves in sheep's clothing?). And the average child today has 10 Barbie dolls (of course, that statistic implies that some have even more—25 Barbies, 2 Kens, 2 Skippers and 8 Baby Barbies to be exact in one particular household with whichRIM is familiar). But who's counting!
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