Back when I went to the Albany Comic Con I picked up a bunch of Star Wars comics from the late 1970s. These were the ones Marvel started publishing between Star Wars and Empire, and contained a random selection of generic sci-fi stories starring Luke and Han and the other characters but conspicuously avoiding any canonical elements, since Lucas was even then careful to keep the licensees away from canon.
Anyway the comics are nostalgically humorous… but the advertisements in them are just priceless. Here’s one that I know will trigger the memories of quite a few readers (click to enlarge and enjoy the details):
This is an advert for Sales Leadership Club. Children would (theoretically) sell greeting cards marketed by this organization and keep the profits for themselves. According to the ad, you could either make $1 a card set or redeem your sales for items from the toy catalogue. And what items they were! A ‘Transistorized Intercom Set’ for only 7 boxes of cards? Or a ‘JR CB Base Station’ for 14 boxes. Or even – for the very successful child merchants – a ‘Stereo Record Player’ for 26 boxes!
Now I did a bit of research here. $1 in those days (1978) equates to about $3.40 today. So the opportunity cost to the child was $3.40 per box in 2010 money. So that record player cost the kid about $88.40 in todays cash, which seems like a pretty good deal. Were I in the club, I would have almost certainly saved my credits for the ‘Telstar TV Game’ (20 boxes), which – at only $20 worth of credits seems too good a deal to pass up.
In Australia we had US comics in the newsagents. And although I rarely purchased any, I can remember adverts like this quite well. As a child I would often look at them and wish I could have joined and earned stuff in the catalogue. Such are the dreams of children, to think “All I have to do is walk the streets selling 20 boxes of greeting cards to random strangers to get a TV game system” is perfectly reasonable, not to mention possible.
Here is another advert:
Read it carefully and then laugh (as we did, over and over) to KLS’s excited comment: “He’s a battery!”
(I also love that he clearly has no articulation).
Here’s a treat for your enjoyment:
Another wonderful advert that would have just sung to me as a child:
There’s so much on that one page I don’t know where to start. So I’ll just say I pity any parent who actually did buy a minimum of 24 loaves on Wonder Bread in only five weeks so their child could attempt to collect all 24 cards. (And let’s speculate, shall we, for how long the ‘CE3K Skywatchers’ newsletter remained in publication.)
Every comic has a page of tiny classified adverts. They are almost (> 90%) for stamp-collecting scams, where the company would send a few free stamps if you agree to preview others “on approval”. This means they keep mailing you stamps that you have to buy unless you send them back. Obviously the goal is to get customers to just buy them out of irritation, and apparently it was successful given how prolific the advertisements are:
It’s all very quaint today. Stamp Collecting as a hobby seems so… yesterday.
Here’s a rather troubling ad culled from the classifieds:
Seahorses are notoriously difficult to keep as pets, requiring very specific water conditions. The thought that someone sent them through the mail to children responding to an advert in a comic is deeply disturbing. I can only imagine how many died in transit 🙁
This last ad is common of many kids mags from the 1970s and 1980s, in all countries I suppose. It’s the place selling silly gag items, that kids of all ages (use to?) find amusing:
The thing I like best is the shamelessness of the ‘pocket spy scope’ blurb. Yep, you can use it to spy on girls. If that didn’t sell more than a few of them, I doubt anything would.
All of these ads were taken from two 1978 comics. Amongst those we didn’t scan were ads for a mail-order Zookeeper degree (no joke!), an ad for a muscle-building supplement that ran unchanged for 8 years, and a host of different Twinkies ads using Marvel art in which characters like Thor and Human Torch enthused about how delicious Hostess products were 🙂