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...
I simply do not know what was going on in the minds of the promotions department of the Hanes Underwear Company that they thought hiring a scary old woman with a boys underwear fetish to promote their products was a neat idea.
And secondly, can you imagine the UPROAR if they got a dirty old man to fool around with the girls underwear like THIS? I mean, what was the difference?
To quote one voice-over on the early Inspector 12 TV commercials "She POKES!.....She STRETCHES.......And that's just the beginning......."
It was violating to look at.
Worse yet, in later commercials she TRAINS other scary old women to do the same thing she does.
I became a sworn Fruit Of The Loom man for the rest of the '80s.........
They were found at any given supermarket. The ubiquitous Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia store displays.
In the pre-internet age, the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia sets were fun to collect. And they lured you in with the first book, which sold for a penny or some ridiculously low price. But each week, you had to buy more volumes at the not-so-cheap regular prices to complete your set.
Once you completed the collection and you just had to pick up the Y-Z book, you were often rewarded with a matching dictionary set or even a small veneer bookcase for your encyclopedia.
Funk & Wagnalls also got into the record business in the '70s, offering a collection of light classical and opera music called The Joy Of Great Music, using the same scheme as their encyclopedias...
How many of you remember THIS when you were a kid?
This was Fisher-Price's nifty little comeback to GAF's ViewMaster. Each cartridge held a short cartoon (it was silent.) Plus it was hand-wound. No batteries!
"Love Buzz" The Shocking Blue (1970)
It's amazing how many people have heard the cover of this song, but
not the ORIGINAL version, the one that inspired Kurt Cobain. If you
haven't, here it is.
It's on the second side of their
self-titled 1970 LP. If you should score a lucky find in the thrift
shop, I'd HIGHLY recommend it. Start to finish, it's a GREAT album and it also has "Venus" on it....
The year was 1979 and there was change in the air.......
1979 was the year the disco backlash began. And something NEW was going to replace it. Something for the '80s. But what?
Well, leave it to Columbia Records to figure that out.
Columbia released this FREE 7" EP to record stores. Columbia (then a part of the CBS Records empire that was acquired by Sony in 1989) had been on a signing binge of assorted Knack-like power pop acts and this EP was a freebie at the counter of the Lynnwood, WA Fred Meyer Music Market I just couldn't pass up. (It had new music on vinyl and it was FREE. So there.....)
There were four recently signed groups featured on this EP.
1. "Take Me To Your Leader" The Sinceros
2. "Do Wah Diddy" The Hounds
3. "Don't Wait Up For Me" The Beat
4. "Good Reason" Jules & The Polar Bears
This EP did help launch a few minor stars. Jules & The Polar Bears, who's frontman Jules Shear reappeared in
1983 as the writer of Cyndi Lauper's megahit "All Through The Night" and The Bangles 1986
hit "If She Knew What She Wants". He's still active and a well respected songwriter.
Paul Collins was no newbie. His former band, The Nerves gave us the original version of what would become a classic for Blondie
His second band, The Beat however ran into a few problems. There was a British band, also called The Beat. So the band changed their name to Paul Collins' Beat (the British band was known in the US as The English Beat.) But Columbia decided to ruffle the feathers of the British band by threatening them with a lawsuit to completely change their name. There were other tensions between Paul Collins' Beat and Columbia that led to Columbia suddenly dropping the band in 1982. But the group pressed on and self financed the videos for their last album for Columbia, one of which became an early MTV hit.
Paul Collins is still active today, fronting the alt-country Paul Collins' Band
None of the other two groups, The Sinceros and The Hounds, who's songs on this EP also got modest airplay on early New Wave stations were ever heard from again.
