Disney’s RiverCountry Rotting in Fittingly Ballardian Way
In 1976, RiverCountry opened up at Walt Disney World in Florida. By 2001, it had closed. Now, it stands–rotting and decrepit in […]
Month: December 2009
Spite House: Is This For Real?
I have heard of spite fences. I have heard of architectural holdouts. But spite houses are a new thing to me. Spite […]
The Almighty Helvetica
We see this everywhere at some point towards the latter half of the 1960s. Helvetica font runs rampant. It’s everywhere: in the […]
The Gentlemanly Library that Never Was
One feature I see again and again from the 1930s to the 1950s is the Gentlemanly Library. In so many cases, I […]
From Happy Beer to Glum Tick Spray
So what happened here. How, in the span of 19 years, did we go from this to that? The first image is […]
Bratty Kids and the Authoritarian Voice
This 2008/9 commercial for Van de Kamp’s fish is another indicator of a cultural shift. Yes, the kid is a mouthy, disrespectful […]
The Center Cannot Hold
At some point in the mid-1960s, we start to see non-centeredness. This ad for Chevrolet “OK” Used Cars from 1968 is a […]
Destroying My Last Memory Cell
My search for this elusive song began in 1981, when I was 17 years old. The song itself was rather unremarkable. If […]
Harkening to a Valentino Past
What about antiquity in ads from the 1960s? There is a point in advertising when we shift from forward-thinking (or even present-thinking) […]
Muscularity and Humility: From 1935 to 1968
Popular Mechanics April 1935. It doesn’t get much better than this. I could write a dissertation about the Popular Mechanics style circa […]