Don’t Use Your Karate Skills on the Seahorses!

February 1976

Claw The Unconquered #5

It’s another random grab bag of mini ads!

The one that strikes me the most here is the one for live seahorses – they’ll send you two “freshly caught” mated pairs, with at least one pregnant. OK, I have two main thoughts on this:

1. Sending live, pregnant seahorses through the mail seems like it would be prohibitively difficult/risky.
2. Capturing seahorses from the wild and then sending them through the mail seems rather cruel… and seems like it should be illegal.

At least Sea Monkeys are in a type of suspended animation when they’re shipped, but live, conscious animals is a whole different story!

 

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Tons of Newtons!

March 1985

G.I. Joe #33

Ah, the fun of a game included within an ad! Here we get to help a pirate through a maze to find a treasure chest full of tasty Fig and Apple Newtons! I’m sure that fun ads like this still exist, just in places I don’t see them – but I just always associate stuff like this with the ’70s and ’80s.

I’ve never really thought of Newtons as cookies, but that’s how they describe them here – huh, new perspective, I guess.

GRITty Persistence

September 1963

X-Men #1

We now have examples of GRIT ads from three different decades! Today’s is from the ’60s, then we’ve got this one from the ’70s and this one from the ’80s.

Wow, just look at how happy that kid is with his sack full of cash! (Is that in pennies?) In this ad the papers sell for 15¢ and you get to keep 5¢, but nine years later the papers sell for 20¢ and you only get to keep 7¢ – I guess that’s inflation for you!

I find it kind of funny that the fact that sellers need to be boys isn’t stressed as highly in this one as in the 1972 ad – maybe at this point they hadn’t even considered that girls might want to sell papers, so didn’t think it was really necessary.

Snap Into A Smoked Beef Snack!

February 1976

Claw The Unconquered #5

I’m not really sure what the deal is with talking about werewolves here – the publishing date is February, and if things were the same in 1976 as they are in 2017, that means this was probably actually published in December, so it’s not like this was around Halloween.

Based on the way they’re marketing this (comparing it to unsatisfying sugary and crunchy snacks), I was wondering if maybe Slim Jims were a new product, but it turns out I was way off – apparently they’ve been around since 1929!

And I had no idea there were so many varieties – I’ve only ever seen original and mild. Where are the pizza Slim Jims now? I want to try those!