History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
If there's one product that illustrates the very lengths of what some men will do to keep from being lonely, it's mail order records like this.
Now I'm not sure how many copies this sold, but I would love to hear some 2014 female critiques of this record. For example, I imagine "The Women's Clothing Store Pick-up" would send sirens going off in the minds of store employees alone before he even got within 50 feet of you.
In
1913 it was legal to mail children. With stamps attached to their
clothing, children rode trains to their destinations, accompanied by
letter carriers. One newspaper reported it cost fifty-three cents for
parents to mail their daughter to her grandparents for a family visit.
As news stories and photos popped up around the country, it didn't take
long to get a law on the books making it illegal to send children
through the mail.
You know, it's the creepy weird crap they make for little girls these days that really makes me take back every bad thing I ever said about Holly Hobbie.
Or at least Holly Hobbie never wore outsized animal carcasses over bubble gum pink hair. And some of you also have young daughters who have begged you or Santa for this.
Now look, I know we live in edgier times. But what the hell is Kawaii Crush?
I had to investigate.
Oh dear. For those of you who just ate Christmas candy, you're probably going to need an insulin shot in 4-3-2-1.....
And who sings this soundtrack? Maroon 5? (I can't tell anymore through all the AutoTune they use in commercial pop music these days.)
Finding no answers from YouTube (and Wikipedia has no current entry on it.)
A Flash video popped up with "What is Kawaii Crush?" above the player and feeling a bit of relief, I watched my relief turn to horror as apparently, these dolls or whatever are, are supposed to be cute and they have cute crushes on cute kitties, cute pandas, cute birds and cute bunnies and cover their craniums in cute cuddly carcasses of cute critters. They live in a world where everything is cute and everyone has a crush. ("Even on candy!")
They have names like Sunny Bunny Hop Hop, Katie Cat Meow Meow, Owlena Hoot Hoot and Amanda Panda Pop.
It's enough to make Hello Kitty look like G.I. Joe.
Fortunately, the web site had a "Grown Ups" link. Unfortunately, it has the only information a parent needs to know from a toy company: Like, Follow, Subscribe and BUY!!
I stopped right here. This is about as far into Kawaii Crush cuteness as I could go without going into catastrophic diabetic shock.
Don't expect to connect this to your wi-fi and hear your favourite podcast.
This radio was made in the late 1960s. And it's a standard AM transistor radio. That's all. Radios like this were the iPods of their day and your 20 song playlist came courtesy of your favourite local Top 40 radio station (almost all of them on AM radio in those days.)
And at the time, what we would later call the internet was then called "ARPANET" And strictly for military and government use only. Computers in the 1960s were extremely huge (often taking up an entire large room and hopelessly limited and underpowered - by 1981 standards!) and were rarely seen outside a laboratory. The very few civilian computers never connected to anything.
The Honeywell 316 was the world's first consumer marketed computer (1969). It was essentially a $10,600 recipe box and pencil. Exactly the thing you want to give someone who allegedly can't cook very well. It had no online connectivity.
That's not to say people weren't dreaming. Note the "flat screen monitors".
While it's almost spooky to consider someone could use a word that would be so ubiquitous 30 years before it's general use, I think "Internet" just sounded like a fancy hi-tech name for a cheap UK electronics brand at the time this radio was made. (I'd have a hard time with the "time traveler" theory.)
More on the discovery of this radio with a very futuristic name here:
Never
heard of The Caroleers? You're not alone. Their name isn't even mentioned on some of their own records!
But if you were a kid of the '50s to '70s, you may have had a few of their records.
And they may have sold as many
Christmas records between 1950-1975 as Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and
Burl Ives.
Admittedly, there are no actual sales numbers of these records because the only places you could find them were in racks at drug stores or supermarkets. And the RIAA never calculated music sales outside mainstream retail record stores in those days. But from the sheer numbers of these records I encounter in thrift stores and on eBay, it was likely a few million.
The Caroleers recorded childrens records for Peter Pan Records in the early '50s as The Peter Pan Caroleers. Peter Pan Records was a division of Synthetic Plastics Corporation (SPC). SPC was based in Newark, NJ and started out in the late '20s making other plastic products (buttons, board game and toy pieces, hair combs and whatever other minute miscellanea you could make out of PVC.)
SPC started Peter Pan Records in 1949. They initially made plastic 78 RPM records for children. They knew as the 33 1/3 RPM long playing and 45 RPM record was taking the nation by storm, there would be BIG business in children's records due to the sudden rise in hand-me-down 78 RPM phonographs from their parents who quickly adopted the slower speeds and multiple speed functions of the automatic record changers that were coming into vogue.
By the late '50s, they were making the then standard 45s. You may better remember the Peter Pan childrens 45s from your '60s/'70s childhood. They were the second biggest (behind Disney) producer of children's records in America.
Playhour Records (late '60s): Contrary to popular collector belief, it wasn't SPC, but Pickwick that made Playhour Records, following the SPC/Peter Pan formula perfectly. Playhour records were packaged in tote pack sets of 12 45s and sold for $3.
SPC expanded in the adult market with their budget record labels. They often mixed in their Caroleers recordings for Peter Pan on their Christmas albums marketed for adults. (Under the Yuletide, Spin-O-Rama, Diplomat and Tinkerbell labels.) These albums are regular thrift store/eBay finds.
Where we have this nearly flawless Perry Como impersonator.....
At least, "The Caroleers" was their pseudonym. No one truly
knows who they were, where they came from. Who was their leader, etc.
Nothing. Session information and artistic liner notes do
not exist. As with everything SPC ever produced..
The cold hard truth is "The Caroleers" were just a blanket name for a group of unknown session singers and musicians at SPC who were paid a flat fee for their services and recieved no royalties from their recordings. And this was perhaps the best selling group on a budget label ever.
And guess how much songwriters Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson got in royalties from The Caroleers' recording of their "Frosty The Snowman"? Just guess.....
In an apparent Gene Autry knockoff.....
Most of The Caroleers recordings were made in the 1950s and '60s at a time when music publishing was fraught with copyright loopholes galore, allowing for dozens of knockoff and "tribute" records (much like we see today.) SPC and other budget record labels got away with this by claiming their music was intended for children and thus for play inside homes, not over the radio or publicly. SPC did not service radio stations and most radio stations did not play their product. (Most.) So they actually claimed that they didn't have to owe songwriters royalties in spite of making millions in profit from their songs.
Today, the artists and songwriters are usually in on it too, as these knockoffs are actually a revenue stream, no matter how disingenuous.
However in the early '70s, songwriters were sick of all these cheap record labels whoring their music and collectively put an end to this racket and most budget labels ceased operation or went into other lines.
About this time however, SPC stopped pressing the old Caroleers records and hacked up something even more nefarious for Christmas in the '70s.
However even in the disco era, old habits died hard with SPC (by then known as Peter Pan Industries.) They even cashed in on the Disco Duck craze with "Irwin The Disco Duck"
SPC went back to exclusively childrens records as Peter Pan and later, Power Records which incorporated an action comic book style format targeted to boys.
Yes
folks, now you too can have your very own men's chorus in the
living room for the holidays. I used to be so embarrassed when my mom
played this one. You could hear it well outside our property line with
minimal amplification And the vinyl versions of this album
were so LOUD, you didn't need any electrical amplification to clearly
hear it, just the needle plowing through the grooves with the volume at
ZERO on it's own can be heard easily in the next room...
Gotta have a little Johnny Cash. This is the original version of his classic "Delia's Gone" from 1962. The younger crowd are probably more familiar with his 1994 remake of this classic
