Wednesday, January 20, 2021

So very late 60's and 1970, it's art, it's imaginative, it's colorful, and fun billboard advertising

Bob Taylor, the in-house art director at JWT advertising company, designed this 1970 dirigible-themed UnCola billboard


Learn a tiny bit about each artist and what they say about their billboard at https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/with/6267760503 

Example:



If it weren’t for hippies, 7Up, the clear lemon-lime soda pop many use to calm the stomach flu, might not exist today. 

In the late 1960s, just when the company was about to go out of business, brilliant advertising executives at J. Walter Thompson Company in Chicago pitched a complete rebranding of the soft drink.

 Declaring 7Up “The UnCola,” paper billboards posted above highways mere months before Woodstock in 1969 exploded with colorful and trippy cartoons of pretty girls, rainbows, sunbursts, flowers, and butterflies. Creatives at the agency mined the popularity of the Beatles’ psychedelic phase and appropriated the “peace, love, and understanding” zeitgeist of the youthful antiwar counterculture—all in the name of selling sugar water.

The “Uncola” struck a chord with the younger generation as the first ads appeared in 1968. They portrayed Coke and Pepsi as “the Establishment,” and tapped into the counterculture

and it worked

vintage UnCola billboard poster by John Alcorn, 1969

much of the so-called “Peter Max look” actually originated at Push Pin Studios, an innovative New York City art and design group founded by Milton Glaser ( also known for the “I [heart] NY logo” ), Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel in 1954. Several 7Up billboard artists, including John Alcorn and Barry Zaid, studied under Glaser, who designed the swirling psychedelic poster for Bob Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” record in 1966.

The highway billboards, 21 feet wide and 10 feet tall, were made up of 12 paper panels, which were pasted up piece by piece. But 7Up wasn’t content to just hang them alongside freeways. The images were offered to college students as posters, as “Fallpaper” to cover their textbooks, and as the actual giant, 12-sheet, 10-foot-tall billboards.






https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/with/5709252580/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/with/6267760503/

https://carney.co/carnage-category/ad/page/64/

https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/1597

https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/collecting-7ups-most-beautiful-hallucinatory-billboards/

Esso Oil Lucky Tiger Money give away Mustang. Makes me wonder, is this car still in someone's driveway or garage, and are they unaware that it was once a contest car?


https://www.ebay.com/itm/Esso-Oil-Lucky-Tiger-Money-Put-a-Tiger-in-Your-Tank-FOUR-4-Tiger-Money-/383296303075

It's been about 20 months since I last found a horse racing starting line gate car

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/vintage-shots-from-days-gone-by.428585/page-5974#post-12902978

a 1970 biker film starring Joe Namath and Ann-Margret


Kim commented with something that deserves your time, the reviews!

The reviewers slammed it like no other movie I've read slammed before. 

This is from Wikipedia:
 The New York Times: 
It's not very long; it pays attention to every hallowed idiocy of its genre, and its characters talk a marvelously unreal type of movie repartee. (Truck-driver: "You a student?" She (cheerfully): "No. I'm a teen-age prostitute. Give you any ideas?") What's more, its images are crammed with advertisements (for, among other things, Hamm's Beer, Hondas and Kraft Cheese) that are its own kind of relevant symbology.

 Chicago Tribune: Supplied it with no stars, felt it was "hateful", adding: "C.C. and Company" is the film that asks the musical question, "What do you want - bad acting or bad taste?" Director Seymore Robbie's idea is to have the women in the film make obscene remarks with their fingers and mouth. After 20 minutes of visual effluvia, the big race is finally on. No, not around the dirt motorcycle track ... the one up in the aisles. Ann-Margret has a brief nude scene in which she proves that in addition to having a foul mouth she is fat.

 Cleveland Press: "C. C. and Company" arrives on the waves of such big budget ballyhoo that it seems a shame to dismiss it by simply calling it awful, which it is. How about meretricious? That's a big budget word for awful and the fellows responsible for this picture needn't feel they've been short-changed in the adjective department. "C. C." is a simple-minded movie for simple-minded audiences. There were times when it came close to being a fairly simple-hearted exercise in action melodramatics if it weren't so purposely and unrelievedly foul mouthed. The motorcycle movie is trying very hard to be a type by itself but it remains basically a western with wheels instead of hooves. This one is a variation on the old melodrama romance plot that at various times has been about an outlaw and a lady, a rustler and the rancher's daughter, a virgin and a gypsy, a princess and commoner and on and on. Football player Joe Namath should have stuck to football ... Actress Ann Margret should have taken up football or something else other than acting. ... [William] Smith offers a perfect picture of nastiness, especially with his whisper-soft voice. He should stick to acting. In one scene a man points to [Joe] Namath and says " ... that's what gives motorcycling a bad name." So do movies like this one.



and I hope you want to read this fantastic analysis of the movie;

At the peak of his powers, and but one year removed from the greatest upset in the history of professional football, Joe Namath – born and bred in coal country, yet destined for the bright lights of Broadway – decided that come hell or high water, he just had to do a biker movie. 

And not just any biker movie, but a dead-on-arrival exercise in inertia so lame that despite the presence of Ann-Margaret and the era’s most damaged collection of dirtbags not in the Manson family, not a single breast would be exposed.

So instead of full-tilt Joe, unmasked and unhinged, we get the kindler, gentler variety; a man who lusts more for car parts than a woman’s anatomy, even one so inviting as the decade’s most beloved redhead.

 More to the point, this is the world’s lone biker gang who refuses to traffic in narcotics, never so much as lighting up a joint to escape the night. No alcohol either, which makes little sense in light of their one minor sin, using the gang’s babes to hustle bread for expenses and the like.

American-type 315, from the heaviest class of 4-4-0s ever built, with Reading–Lancaster local train 901 at Shreiners, circa 1940.

https://ctr.trains.com/railroad-reference/great-passenger-trains/2020/06/reading-co-gallery

passenger service on the Canadian Pacific


https://ctr.trains.com/railroad-reference/great-passenger-trains/2019/04/cp-gallery?fbclid=IwAR1nmE9ggotkjWIBzF0ilzKjVgxnUzLaatuJjlOEM9HOFoxB4nnmlQtJ7DE

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

oh the innovative ideas you can learn from the old timers that had to make do without a credit card, or a Snap On van full of tools

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/vintage-shots-from-days-gone-by.428585/page-5975#post-12903216

I ain't ever seen a VW micro bus drift before... but this one does it with luggage in the racks!


https://www.facebook.com/thevintagent/videos/10158397061883791

In WW1, two motorcycling pals living in London volunteered to set up a nursing station near the front lines in Belgium, near Ypres. They proved skilled ambulance drivers and triage nurses, and even brought their own motorcycles with them.




It was horrific duty, they were often shelled, but they stayed nearly four years, and were known as the Angels of Pervyse, for the village they had set up in, under a ruined farmhouse. They were famous women in WW1, and raised more money selling war bonds than anyone else.  A few books have been written, plus their own, The Cellar House of Pervyse


https://www.facebook.com/thevintagent/posts/10158420599758791

the story of the scam that Elizabeth Carmichael ran when she tried to get investors for a fuel-efficient three-wheeled vehicle during the 1970s gas crisis.



The series debuts with two back-to-back episodes Sunday Jan 31st (9:00-11:00 p.m. ET/PT), with new episodes airing subsequent Sundays at 9:00 p.m.  on HBO and be available to stream on HBO Max.

the motorcycle museum in Hochgurgl in Tyrol Austria, with about 200 motorcycles from roughly 100 different manufacturers, in an all pine wood building, went up like a gas torch at 4am today. All the collection is lost, so there's only photos to look at to see what they used to have


Isabelle photographed the collection in 2020, and has the best gallery I've seen so far: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=isabelle.bracquemond.7&set=a.10225306698523407



see the video tour of the collection 

https://www.kaleidoskop-wuerth.com/the-scheiber-boys

https://www.crosspoint.tirol/en-galerie

via

https://www.facebook.com/groups/654324954604252/permalink/366226710047667

https://www.facebook.com/thevintagent/posts/10158502054278791

Abandoned locomotive at the deserted lumber town Copeland.

https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/267825?fbclid=IwAR1_AkS54JDzl-03g6TSUFNF-7I01BsDLwEWcC1F2B680VXHPI3wG8dEOk4

a unique type of caboose..it's known as a shoving platform caboose. Instead of having the conductor hang off the side of a caboose the platform gives them a safe place to stand.


https://www.facebook.com/RWRRMuseum/posts/4883113165092056

130-car pile-up due to a snowstorm hitting a highway in northern Japan (Thanks Gary!)

Authorities had already enforced a 50km (31mile) speed limit on the road due to visibility.

There was a maximum wind speed of about 100km/h (62mph) at the time of the incident, local weather officials said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55708417

cool city bus in Christmas decoration


http://mildlyinteresting-blog.blogspot.com/2018/11/my-city-dresses-up-buses-for-christmas.html

Monday, January 18, 2021

I wish more advertising would use humor and entertainment

https://murdercycles.tumblr.com/post/614032021940043776/i-can-only-see-one-mistake-owning-a-vw-bus-life#notes

what's in the far lane?

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/altered-wheelbase-picture-thread.393460/page-81#post-13292573

I get such a kick out of the checklist of competitors on raceccars, here's Mr. Norm's '65 Coronet


https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/altered-wheelbase-picture-thread.393460/page-81#post-13252664

one cool motorcycle, a 'Honda Six' made for less than the cost of buying the genuine bike’s front wheel ( thanks Steve! )





Allen Millyard has now produced this RC374: his tribute to Mike Hailwood’s race-winning RC166. And he’s built it for less than the cost of buying the genuine bike’s front wheel!

"It all started when I met Guy Martin at Castle Combe last July and he was parading one of the originals," says Millyard. "I’ve always fancied one but the price is out of my league. Riding home I started thinking: where can I get a couple of engines?

"So I called DK Motorcycles. I was after the Honda NC23 ‘Baby Blade’ engine but they’re so rare, so I went for the Yamaha FZR250R because they rev to 18,000rpm. It took from July to October to rebuild it as a six and get it running."

Unbelievably, Millyard’s technical information all came from a book full of photographs meant for model makers. From those photographs, he calculated the scale then worked out the dimensions for the bike.

https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/2018/may/allen-millyard-honda-six-rc374/

Targa Tasmania... I bet that would be a hell of a lot of fun! (thanks Paul!)



and this next wasn't editted for shit, it's over when the car is out of sight, in 13 seconds. But DAMN, he knows how to zip through those right angle turns! 


and you've probably never seen or heard an Avanti act like a proper sports car before, but this one is


and sometimes, something goes wrong... out of the blue, no warning




converted Model T, or put put with a model t hood and grill?


https://www.facebook.com/RWRRMuseum/

Gary Larsen is a genius, and the Far Side comics were just incredible for their innovation and variety of all topics



https://www.facebook.com/RWRRMuseum/

Love the look of this chimney

https://www.facebook.com/tpwca/posts/420607356052833

Report filed with the California Bureau of Automotive Repair, Complaint Dept, against JBA

https://www.dca.ca.gov/webapps/bar/complaints.php

Mike Randall's race car tow truck



https://www.customcarchronicle.com/early-custom-cars/customized-tow-trucks/#.YAUXLOhKiUk

clockwork operated boat tail racer toysmade by Tipp & Co, Nuremberg, Germany, 1932-1939