If you’re in the San Francisco area, come out and join us for Tiki Central’s 7th Annual Tiki Bar Crawl. And if you’re not in the San Francisco area, watch it live on our mobile webstream, 3:30pm – late on Friday, 2:00pm – really late on Saturday, and 3:00pm till evening on Sunday.

Details available on tikiweekend.com!

Neato Coolville has done it again with another amazing post. This time it is a collection of giant advertising characters, including several Paul Bunyons, a couple of Big Texs, a spaceman, and even a lumbering Alfred E. Newman. Be sure to check them all out.

Everyone here at the Junkyard Clubhouse love a good flapjack. So I was quite thrilled to see Neato Coolville‘s post about the Perkins Pancake House menu. It’s a great example of the wonderful design sensibilities of the the midcentury. The colors work well with our blog, too. Neato Coolville has full scans on the inside menu as, well.

Gwen Verdon was ahead of her time: here she is with two dancers, performing a Bob Fosse-choreographed routine on the Ed Sullivan show, to Unk’s 2006 crunkular odyssey, “Walk it Out.”

Okay, okay, the original song was “Mexican Breakfast,” and is equally awesome. But it’s uncanny, no?

It took me well into my second viewing to realize she has sunglasses lurking deep in that ‘fro.

[via Perez Hilton]

The other day as I was doing some dishes, I was wondering if anyone actually still soaks their hands in Palmolive. When I was a kid, it made me feel so very elegant and grown up. And then, as often happens, my thoughts turned to YouTube.

YouTube also has the original Madge commercial — the quality on that one is pretty poor, though.

I saw this posted on Eye of the Goof last week, and it’s too cool not to share… but I hesitate, because the theme song you’ll hear is so catchy that I can’t help but wonder if I could have legitimate legal claims filed against me for subjecting you to it. So, DISCLAIMER: WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK. If you find yourself tossing and turning at night, unable to get to sleep because of an urgent need to dance violently and find a ticket for a double decker London bus… well, you asked for it.

Here Come the Double Deckers was a kids’ show from 1970-71, co-produced by the BBC and 20th Century Fox and filmed in England. Seventeen episodes were created, and it aired both in the UK and here in the States. The show stars seven young kids who know their way around a Watusi, and have nicknames that scream “packaged product”: Scooper, Spring, Billie (it’s a boy’s name, but it’s really a girl!), Brains (he wears glasses! he’s so smart!), Doughnut (he’s overweight! he can’t stop eating!), Sticks (he plays the drums! so hip!) and Tiger (that’s the name of the littlest girl, and her stuffed animal! so wacky!).

It didn’t sink in for me until the second viewing that their hangout is a junkyard clubhouse (!). I was distracted the first time ’round by the flailing dance moves of the kids. You can tell that the director had been yelling all morning, “Bigger! Bigger! More movement! More action! I want to see wild arm swings!” These kids make the Barney’s kids look like lumps. Lumps with lame dance moves.

I hope the music was at least half as good as the cover art — way groovy:

The Quests’ Go Go ReQuests

A post on Robot Action Boy pointed me to this treasure trove of Asian pop album covers from the ’60s and ’70s. Good god, they just keep going and going… and every last one has got some kind of crazy-cool thing about it.

The Quests’ Go Go ReQuests album (pictured above) — well, you can see for yourself how fabulous it is. One of the songs on the album is “Ding Dong Twist,” which sounds like either a new Hostess snack product, or an obscene gesture. Sing Along With the Christones features a band of young, hip, Asian priests — each wearing one of those little white & black priest collar things. Four Hits, also from the Quests, has a very soulful-looking pointing finger on the cover — appropriately, to illustrate their song “Soul Finger.” Now, that’s a song I want to hear.

Off Beat Cha Cha

Some of the albums look funky, like they may be soundtracks to obscure Thaispoitation films… others look like the Ravi Shankar’s schtick re-arrived back home after being filtered through the Beatles… and lots are clearly light, fluffy Go-Go dancing frothiness, complete with smiling, happy girls. Well, except for Off Beat Cha Cha, which has three girls who are clearly dancing under court order and are miserable about it.

Don’t take my word for it, go check out the entire gallery of albums for yourself at David Greenfield’s photo site.

Walt Disney’s passport

Walt Disney’s 1965 passport is up for sale on eBay. He died just a year and a half after it was issued, and its only use was for a trip to London. The UK premiere of Mary Poppins was on August 23, 1965, just four days after this passport was issued, and that seems a likely use, but the London arrival stamp isn’t shown, and the New York return stamp says September 29. It’s currently at $3,600, and is estimated to close in the neighborhood of $14,400-$21,600 when the auction ends on Saturday. [via TMZ]

Mastermind

I really don’t need to say anything. The cover says plenty. Go on, I know you just want to look at it for a bit. I’ll be right here when you’re done.

I Love This World posted about the cover to Mastermind, and made my day. Has any game ever had better packaging? I think not. Hanford said it all, when he looked over my shoulder as I was preparing that photo to post — “Ooh, Mastermind! That was a very adult game.” Yes, yes it was. It was a game that demanded the most refined demeanor your seven-year-old self could muster (which mostly involved one raised eyebrow and a lot of “hmmm… interesting”s and soft, knowing chuckles under one’s breath). I loved this game, but even to this day, I cannot tell if it was really the game I loved, or if it was the cover. Mastermind was mental dress-up in a box.

I mean, look at it! Clearly, those two are plotting world domination, and are taking a break from their evil schemes to play a little mind game with you. They will win. It is a foregone conclusion. But you’re happy to be their little plaything, because they are so urbane and suave, and maybe if you play along with them they’ll be nice to you after they take over the world, and MY GOD THEIR TABLE IS SO SHINY.

And that woman — is she just along for the ride? Is she playing him, and biding her time until she can cast him aside? Or has he warped her to his purposes? Hm, maybe you should try to save her. But you can hear her laughs mocking you even now, at the thought that she might need saving. Yes, we will play this game as a distraction, while you suss out what’s really going on here.

If you’d like the mystery broken (and by broken, I mean shattered into a thousand little pieces, never to be reconstructed), move along past the jump, and learn the story of the making of the Mastermind cover, and see a recreation of the photo with this same couple, 30 years on. (Hint: They didn’t succeed in taking over the world.)

Read the rest of this entry »

A Weight Watchers recipe card from 1974

Wendy McClure found a collection of Weight Watchers recipe cards in her parents’ basement a few years back — no one in the family would admit to having purchased them, and she got to keep them. Photos of midcentury food are always a spectacle, but it’s her addition of MST3K-like commentary that really makes it something else. Not that the recipe cards need much help being ridiculous, with names like Snappy Mackerel Casserole, Fluffy Mackerel Pudding, and the relatively straight-forward Mackerelly. Weight Watchers was really pushing the mackerel.

I first saw these when they were posted on Tiki Central a few years ago; Tiki Wahine brought the thread up again the other day with a new link (the old one had died). Now Wendy McClure has a book out of these culinary masterpieces, The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. I actually kind of want to make the Frankfurter Spectacular.