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 […]
Author: Lee Wallender
Deception, influence, fakes, illusions, themed environments, simulations, secret places, secret infrastructure, imagined places, dreamscapes, movie sets and props, evasions, camouflage, studio backlots, miniatures.
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 […]
Faux Sixties Humility: Charlie Brown vs. Gen. Montgomery
How to find that exact apex of U.S. culture? Let’s go a little farther out, bracketing it with two extreme points, one […]
Kahn, Khan, and Thermonuclear War
This is more about words than it is about nuclear war. But it’s trivia that has been lodged in my brain for […]
Where Is the Missing $3 Million From the Lost Hawaii Clipper?
It’s strange enough that a boat-plane with $3,000,000 in cash would go missing. It’s also strange that it would be so underreported. […]