I love midcentury futurism names. I dig on the Cinerama, and I can’t get enough juice from the Juice-o-matic. I named my game studio Monolux, I named my feedback system the Suggestomatic, and I named my game’s serial number generator the Tabulatron. Not only love those names, but I love the logos, styles, and aesthetics they conjure up. So naturally I became giddytronic when I saw Thrift Store Adventure’s photo collection of midcentury names and logos! There’s the Filmosonic, the Delineascope, the Selectron Semimatic, and WTF the Superheterodyne!!!! Check them out now!
I found an Architectural Digest from 1959 a while back in an antique mall, and naturally it has some fantastic images of midcentury design. This one is quite possibly my favorite: the office of Mr. McCulloch, the head honcho at McCulloch Corporation.
Mr. McCulloch’s Private Office, from a 1959 Architectural Digest
The nerve center
The space was designed for McCulloch by the famed modern designer Paul Laszlo, and it’s really quite beautiful. I can’t tell from the pictures what the details are on the wall, but there was some sort of tiled design that must have been stunning.
But the real star of the photo is clearly this desk. It’s just out of this world! Check out those three clunky handsets, each with its own hidey-hole for the cord (I’m sure the cords were tangled in a heap on the floor in no time) and awkwardly placed rotary dial. And the drawers! Someone most likely hand-painted these labels on each one, in that beautiful lettering. The desk is so stuffy and proud to be corporate — we’re across the nation now, you know! We’ve got regions! And that CLASSIFIED drawer, trying to look nonchalant between WESTERN and SOUTHERN.
I also love the giant, menacing portraits on the wall… they look more like somber, elfin, former McCulloch presidents than the president’s children.
100 years of Kellogg’s breakfast advertising all wrapped up in a tasty Flash coating. This should be better than it actually is, but there’s a few gems in there. You can save images if you use the “enlarge image” button first.
The Monsanto House of the Future was part of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland from 1957 until 1967, and was a showcase of what plastics could do. The house was made of eight pre-fabricated plastic pieces; the building was so strong that when the time came for it to be demolished, the wrecking ball bounced right off.
Disneyland’s Monsanto House of the Future, from Daveland
The House of the Future under construction
The Daveland blog has some great pictures from the Goody Clancy architecture firm of the house as it was being constructed. I love the above picture of the completed home — largely because it captures the pastoral feel of the landscaping, which is in such sharp contrast to the modern-as-modern-can-be home. I also love this picture to the left — this time, it’s the contrast of the traditional Sleeping Beauty’s castle in the background against the upstart little plastic building.
I’ve kind of got a thing for armadillos. I’ve never seen one in person — a live one, at least… I saw a squished one at the side of the road once when I was in Texas for a business trip. I can rattle off random armadillo facts for you (They’re born as litters of identical quadruplets! The only one that can roll up into a perfect ball is the three-banded armadillo! The pink fairy armadillo is only four inches long! They carry leprosy!), but I think you’ll be much more interested in this:
My armadillo purse
Lined with pink satin!
Your eyes do not deceive you: this is a purse, made of an actual, real armadillo. It’s been bent around into a sort of football shape, clutching itself with its sweet little claws, and with rhinestones for eyes. It’s lined in pink satin, and has a mirror under its neck so you can check your lipstick. It is fancy.
I got this as a gift from my mom, who also has a thing for armadillos. She found it for me more than ten years ago, I have no idea where, and I don’t know how old it is. I’ve heard that they used to sell these down near the border in Texas, and that they were a popular tourist item.
The image on the left is from a rare stop-motion puppet of Jerry Lewis that was built by the Rankin/Bass animation studio for some specials. While I’m not a huge Jerry Lewis fan, I can’t get over how cool it would have been if Rankin/Bass (creators of all the great stop-motion Christmas specials) had gone through and produced these cartoons. The puppet has a look to it that you just don’t see in modern animation. Check out the all the photos of the Jerry Lewis Puppet.
According to the Rankin/Bass Historian, it turns out that Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass were huge Jerry Lewis fans and were working on two projects to being Jerry Lewis to stop-motion world. One was “Punch and Judy” and the other was “The Bellboy”. They never went into full production but there was some work done on them. A song was written called “Hey Bellhop!”, which has been locked away in the Rankin/Bass vaults all these years. A demo recording of the song will be included in the soon-to-be-released soundtrack to the The Daydreamer, a special I’ve never seen. Seeing the image of the Jerry Lewis puppet fills my mind with thoughts of what this might have been.
Ze King! Ze Premier! Then all the ministers!
Army! Navy! Department Sanitaire! …
This Harveytoon cartoon isn’t really outstanding in any particular way, but it’s one I remembered as a kid I’ve wanted to see again for probably the last 20 years. I’ve searched for it several times before, and while it’s mentioned in several places in the web, I’ve only come across an actual video of it very recently! It’s beloved by many, but probably totally unknown to most. Here’s the description from IMDB’s entry for it, see if it shakes loose any memories:
A French shopkeeper’s life is disrupted by a daily parade. The parade consists of “ze king, ze premier, all ze lords and ministers, army, navy, department sanitaire.” When the “department sanitaire” hits a pothole, all the garbage gets dumped onto the street in front of his store.
One of my more prized possessions is this LP. Meet Luie Luie. Luie Luie recorded this album in 1971 — he composed, arranged and played all the music on this album. Luie Luie, you see, is a dynamo.
He hoped to spur a new dance craze, called the Touchy. As Luie Luie explains in one of several opening monologues, Touchy songs all start with a “wiiiiiild trumpet introduction,” signalling that it is time to start dancing the Touchy. To dance the Touchy, you dance however you want, as long as you are touching your partner. Any body part will do: nose-to-nose, elbow-to-elbow, toe-to-bellybutton, “or what have you.”
I was hepped to Luie Luie thanks to Hanford and his copy of Songs in the Key of Z, which has the first song from this album, “El Touchy”:
Click play to hear El Touchy, and be forever changed
Once I heard it, I knew I had to track down this album. It wasn’t easy, but it was well worth it — surprisingly, not just for the songs, but for the astounding text on the back of the album. Just when I thought the writing had reached the apex of absurdity, bang! — it got weirder. And weirder. The internet’s many Chuck Norris biographers could learn a thing or two from the back of this album. When I die, I want my eulogy to simply be someone reading the back of this album, replacing “Luie Luie” with “Humuhumu.”
Luie Luie is never one to disappoint his audience, and to celebrate his inimitable spirit, I offer for you here, today, in its entirety, the actual liner notes from this album, formatted as close to the original as I could muster. Enjoy.
