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Cory Doctorow at 12:22 pm • 
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For all of us who swooned with Bloom County's Milo Bloom as he crushed on Betty Crocker, here's a nice retrospective of the Betties of times gone by.
Betty Crocker Thru' The Ages, Stories Behind 10 Famous Food Logos
Cory Doctorow at 10:00 am • •
The rather unfortunate product name ("Borden's Hemo") along with the odd, stilted smile of the young man as he approaches the beverage suggests a vampiric note that probably wasn't intended.
Cory Doctorow at 7:25 pm • •
This ad hearkens back to the days before America came to mistrust its military-industrial complex, the dreamtime when the scream of jets was a sound to comfort your children.
Cory Doctorow at 10:15 am • •
This 1948 ad for Viking's "VisQueen" plastic film paints a utopian vision of a world where everything is entombed in airtight plastic layers, rendering it sterile and impervious to the world's depredations and imperfections. My grandmother practiced this sort of mummification in her living room and most of the kitchen until all her grandchildren were well past adolescence.
Cory Doctorow at 1:21 pm • •
A long-lost brand, and singularly odd one. Like discovering Spicy Cajun Visine Hot Sauce lurking in the product's history.
Cory Doctorow at 9:27 am • •
The Jolly Green Giant was always the most ambiguous and slightly threatening of the tinned food mascots. Tilt your head and squint and this is a cruel titan who's toying with the mortals at his dinner table before turning them loose for the Wild Hunt. Plus: Mexicorn!
Cory Doctorow at 10:19 am • •
From the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, this contribution by V.Valenti, showing a superb space-age Lestoil ad.
Cory Doctorow at 4:58 pm • •
A near-perfect example of the monster-movie drive-in poster-maker's art.
Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am • •
This ad for Glyde.com, a games retailer/reseller, focuses on how incredibly awful shopping at their major competitor, GameStop, is. A quick look at our archives confirms that GameStop is hardly a paragon of corporate virtue.
GameStop Protest (via Super Punch)
Cory Doctorow at 9:57 am • •
There's loads to love about this 1947 ad for Air France's sleeper service -- just look at that cutaway diagram! -- but the chart-topping eye-grabber is that awesome sleeper-service bed. Man, if Air France was still flying planes with that interior, I'd never fly anything else.
Loads more mouth-watering vintage aviation luxury ads here.
Cory Doctorow at 10:45 am • •
This Pan-Am ad from 1983 really grabbed my attention with an oddly disharmonious message: first you have the cowboy, sleeping with his hat over his eyes, a symbol of ruggedness and the ability to relax and sleep anywhere, out on the range under a cactus. But then you have the ad's USP: "Delta has spacious, comfortable seats." Do cowboys really value comfort? Isn't that a little citified? You know: "The chores! The stores! Fresh air! Times Square!" Or "East is east and west is west and the wrong one I have chose."
Ah, but the cowboy is wearing a suit. He's not a cowboy, he's a poseur, a nouveau riche oilman who likes to play pretend-cowboy as he jets from one five-star suite to the next. He doesn't clear brush on his ranch, he hires real roughnecks to do that, because otherwise he'd ruin his fancy manicure. So the value proposition here comes down to: Fly Pan-Am, it's the airline for insecure fake cowboys who have too much money.
Odd.
Cory Doctorow at 2:03 am • •
This year-old butter ad from TINE, Norway's "butter monopolist" manufacturer, eerily presages Norway's notorious, Atkins-fuelled butter shortage.
Reklamefilm TINE Smør - Superchef (Thanks, Samurai!)
Cory Doctorow at 5:49 am • •
Here's a gallery of advertisements from the Bohn Aluminium and Brass Corporation, illustrated in super-modernist, streamlined style by Arthur Radebaugh. They run the gamut from future farms to future vehicles to exploded engine diagrams, with monorails and super-jumbos and transparent curvy refrigerators for all. They're full of wartime pluck, with ad copy like, "When peace is established, a great variety of new products for the housewife will be forthcoming. One of these will be a new refrigerator... When Victory comes, Bohn will continue such work as designing new refrigerator parts..."
Imaging the Future, Arthur Radebaugh, Bohn Aluminium and Brass Corporation, advertisements (via How to Be a Retronaut)
Cory Doctorow at 7:22 am • •
On How to Be a Retronaut, a seasonal gallery of Christmas gun ads, including this sugar-addled, gift-crazed lad with a rifle and a thousand-yard stare.
