box vox

Super PAC Packaging

As we enjoy a new, hyperbolic political season, generously funded by large amounts of Super Political Action Committee money, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at some earlier types of Super Pac.

Not surprisingly, the name was previously associated with packaging.

SuperPac, Inc., whose logo appears at top, offers “A Tradition of Excellence in Flexographic Printing.”

SuperPAC™ (logo: above center) is a trademark of Thomasville Furniture:

Thomasville’s promise to provide our customers with the best overall kitchen, bath, and other room solutions initiated our development of SuperPAC, our patent pending packaging technique.

And SuperPac is also the name of a British company that makes a car stereo accessory. (Logo by Frankman Design)

Superpac is the new way to hold your detachable car stereo front. Designed to replace the dull black plastic case supplied with most car stereos, the Superpac offers you a stylish way to protect your cherished face-off style car stereo.

Mastey de Paris carries a SuperPac “Intensive Reconstructor Conditioner for Stressed, Damaged Hair” (above, right)

Superpac reconstructs damaged hair, rebuilding and reinforcing the hair’s protein chains. Superpac enables hair to retain its elasticity and structural integrity with newfound bounce and resilience.

Mastey de Paris

There was also a Timberland Super Pac boot. (via: Gwar Izm)

Nowadays, a candidate whose political campaign benefits from Super PAC money is not supposed to “coordinate directly” with his or her Super PAC benefactor. In practice, however, a candidate’s Super PAC is often run by a close ally—a Super PAC man.  (e.g., Jon Stewart is Steven Colbert’s “Super PAC man”)

Not to be confused with an earlier “Super Pac-Man.”

Top & center: Commodore 64 “Super Pac-Man” packaging from Moby Games; bottom photo: a General Mills Pac-Man cereal with “Super Pac-Man Marshmallows” from Jason Liebig’s flickr Photostream

Now, if we were willing to be more liberal about the spelling of the term—accepting say “PAK” as a reasonable variant (as in Political Action Kommittee?)—then there’s even more to think about.

(More, after the fold...)

Food Stamp Beer Photos

While looking for Ballantine XXX Ale bottles for a post last month, I found the illicit-looking photo in the upper right corner.

From a series of photographs by Brayden Olson for Vice Magazine. I like the paparazzi flash and intestinal-pink^* backgrounds of these photos, but I have some misgivings about the article it illustrates. Apparently it’s possible at certain bodegas in NYC to get around the regulations prohibiting the use of food stamps to purchase alcoholic beverages.

“... since receipts at most bodegas in Brooklyn aren’t itemized and products in the store are never scanned (most likely because they are thieves), there is no way to tell what you actually bought.”

“Food Stamp Beer Reviews” Vice

I cringe to think of this article being used to punch more holes in the already tenuous social safety net. With unemployment so high, the demographic of food stamp recipients has clearly changed.

Food policy experts and human resource administrators are quick to point out that the overwhelming majority of the record 38 million Americans now using food stamps are their traditional recipients: the working poor, the elderly and single parents on welfare.

But they also note that recent changes made to the program as part of last year’s stimulus package, which relaxed the restrictions on able-bodied adults without dependents to collect food stamps, have made some young singles around the country eligible for the first time.

Hipsters on food stamps, by Jennifer Bleyer
Salon, March 15, 2010

If “unemployment” can somehow still be viewed as a character defect in the minds of those who have recently characterized the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “unemployed, uneducated and uninformed” — this bodega beer thing may eventually wind up on Fox News as a way of discrediting these new, younger food stamp recipients and food assistance programs in general.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

A footnoted digression: *The color “intensinal pink” is not my own invention. My father coined this term to describe the color of my grandmother’s house on Long Island.

Mated Container Units

Yesterday’s post about the similar interlocking bottles, raised a number of questions. The patent drawings above date from 1963 to 2008, each showing a different patented method of connecting separate bottles. There are plenty of products that can be sold in pairs — shampoo & conditioner; 2-part epoxy; oil & vinegar — but what are consumers to make of it when these products are sold in interlocking bottles?

Are they anthropomorphic couples? Are they happily married? Are they promiscuous? Or are they more like puzzle pieces fitting together?

Or body parts fitting together?

The 69-ish innuendo of yesterday’s bottle structure (and the single quote marks ‘’ in Joy Lin’s Hustler Lubricant concept) is even more explicit in Franck Legoupil’ 2001 patent for a “Container Assemble of Two Nested Containers,” pictured above.

This same symmetrical gender-geometry is also at work in the “Mated Container Units” patented by Juris M. Mednis in 1986:

“A multi-purpose container unit whose hollow body, neck and shoulder sections are proportioned and constructed in a manner that allows interfacing and mating with an identical or mirror image unit of like size... The container has a neck and a recessed portion along its vertical axis which accepts and provides safe harbor and protection to the neck and closure portion of the mated unit whose corresponding body recess, in turn, accepts the neck and closure portion of a second container of the mated unit...”

(See what the “Mated Container Units” look like, after the fold...)

Capitalist Box vs. Socialist Box

I saw this a while back on Packaging UQAM:

Sophie Valentine’s project for Louis Gagnon’s “Design Graphique Introduction” course at Canada’s UQAM. The project is “3D Typographic Expression” and her solution is shown above.

Socialism and capitalism are two realities that clearly oppose. However, Winston Churchill did not consider one better than the other. He said: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” To demonstrate this paradox, socialism is represented by eight small cubes attached to each other. While capitalism is represented by a cube equal to the size of eight.

Design Intro Blog

This interests me for a number of reasons.

A. The white “socialist” cube appears to be one of those hinged folding cube puzzles — sometimes called “magic cubes” — often used as an advertising promotion. I might be wrong. It may be hinged a little differently, but it would be ironic for “socialism” to be represented by an promotional object.

B. The Winston Churchill quote above seems to parallel the contrast that Chevron CEO, John Watson attempted (in his testimony to congress yesterday about oil company tax breaks) when he tried to suggest that the American people would rather share in Chevron’s prosperity than to have Chevron share in their sacrifice. (See also: Joe, The Plumber)

(More reasons, after the fold...)

Frack Pack

Saw Gasland on TV a while back, so I knew about “fracking” and how it had seriously contaminated drinking water here in the United States, but I didn’t know that Canada was thinking of competing with us in the area of flammable drinking water!

Goût de schiste (“Good Taste of Quebec Shale”) is Valérie L’italien’s concept for the commercialization of this particular type of firewater. (d’eau flambé?)

Turning the perceived flaw of flammability into a product feature, she brings us: packaged (flammable) water.

Done as a project for Sylvain Allard’s packaging class at UQAM, Professor Allard has this to say about the new beverage:

... after having promised the moon to oil and gas companies, our good government finds itself in trouble because of the negative reaction of Quebecers who fear the environmental consequences of shale gas. In fact, dramatic stories have been reported in some American states where groundwater got contaminated with the shale gas. Pictures of taps that ignite were shown in the media...

Never mind, we must move forward announced Minister Nathalie Normandeau hammering that shale gas must create wealth. She never explains how this wealth will eventually come back to us though. In fact, like all our natural resources, profits seem more a vision of the mind than a reality. But Nathalie seems convinced that people just don’t get it and that against all odds, her government has the mandate to go forward.

In my packaging class, we believe we have the real solution to increase the collective wealth. Because shale gas is likely to contaminate our groundwater, why resist the temptation to exploit the bonanza? Indeed, what may seem like a catastrophe could become a true treasure. I named the shale gas carbonated water developed by my student Valerie Italian. After Perrier and Sanpellegrino, we would have the Good Taste of Quebec Shale. This particular carbonated water would be available in several flavors and come with a match to burn the excess gas...

via: Packaging UQAM (Read the full story: here)

(See also: Toxic Trail Mix and Elizabeth Royte on Packaged Water)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Charms Packaging

By “charms” I mean: Assorted Charms hard candy from the Charms Candy Company (now part of Tootsie Roll Industries).

After last Fridays post about “Packaging Charms” I thought it would be clever to do a post about “Charms Packaging. ” (Note the shallow symmetry of my thought process!)

Little did I suspect, there were actually a lot of interesting things to discover about Charms candy and its packaging.

Issued during World War II in U.S. combat rations as a supplemental energy food, their colorful outer wrappers were unique among the standard olive drab ration packages.

VictorySeeds.com

The label above-left shows the wrapper design included in ration packages during World War II. The photo top-right is the current Charms packaging. The inset photo (above-right) is a 1947 package from the Korean War.

If Charms candy wrappers were a graphic departure from the usual generic look of ration packaging, how suitable that the one below is shown on a Ration Type-K, Morale Series package—another graphic departure which we featured last May.

Photo via: US Military Forum

Charms candies are still included in U.S. military ration packs, but in recent years the brand has come under a cloud, apparently for failing to deliver on its implied brand promise. A fundamental definition of “charm” is that it’s “something believed to bring good luck.”

How paradoxical that, for many American soldiers today, Charms Candy is believed to bring exactly the opposite. How unlucky for the manufacturer that this idea has become so ingrained in G.I. culture.

Soldiers do not eat Charms candies. They are believed to be very bad luck. As soon as you find them in an MRE you throw them away.

Ehow: The History of Charms Candy Company

(Three more examples, after the fold...)

Shelf Reliance

Following up on yesterday’s train of thought about 1960s fallout shelters and their stockpiles of canned goods—(it’s “end-of-the-world week”, here on boxvox)—we find that President Kennedy’s impulse to privatize civil defense has apparently evolved over the years into what we now call the “survivalist” (or “preparedness”) movement. There are a number of businesses catering to this constituency. Shelf Reliance is one of them:

SHELF RELIANCE is a company that specializes in food storage, storage rotation, and emergency preparedness products. Our goal is to help families prepare for whatever tomorrow may bring, allowing them to feel confident if disaster strikes.

(from the About Us section of their web site)

Where some survivalist food packaging emulates a generic, civil defense look, Shelf Reliance’s “Thrive” brand is light and airy and uses a pastel color-code to differentiate between food groups. Their products are even carried by Costco.

Food rotation, the concept introduced by Better Homes & Garden in the late 1950s, seems to now be an established practice for many Americans. (I hadn‘t realized that.) What is it that Shelf Reliance’s customers should be preparing for? According to their web site:

• Natural Disaster
• Terrorism
• Labor Strike
• Economic Depression
• Drought
• Crop Failure
• Personal Tragedy
• Civil Unrest
• Unemployment

One big change from the 1960s—nuclear fallout is not mentioned.

(Some food rotation products and survivalist videos, after the fold

Helmut Smits’s Drum Kit (& other package-related works)

Drum Kit, 2003 (tin cans, metal wire)

“Helmut Smits is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.”

Not all of Helmut Smits’ work is package-related, but enough so that, if I were a more patient and strategic man, I could cherry-pick images from his web site to feature here—one at a time—for quite a while. Instead, I’m presenting them as I found them—all at once.

On On left: “0.26 Gallon of Oil” 2007 (1L Coca-Cola bottle filled with oil) Photo by Lotte Stekelenburg; on right: “The Real Thing” 2006 (An installation to filter Coca-Cola into clean drinking water.) Photo by Rick Messemaker

Above are two separate works from 2006 and 2007 that each involve Coca-Cola. When I look at these now, in 2010, because of what’s going on right now with the on-going BP oil spill, I cannot help but associate both of these artworks with that.

“I liked the fact that oil looks the same as Coca-Cola. One is: the product that America dominates the world with [Coca-Cola], the other is: the product that America consumes the most worldwide [oil].”

–Helmut Smits from an interview in Chief Magazine, Issue #7

The Coke bottle full of oil, I had assumed, was a reference to the petroleum used to make PET bottles. Like Luis Camnitzer’s “Coca Cola Bottle filled with a Coca Cola Bottle” here, too, a bottle that contains what it is made of. This, of course, is exactly the sort of negative connotation—(conflating Coke with crude oil)—that Coca-Cola was hoping to address with their recent “PlantBottle™” initiative.

In “the Real Thing” Smits ironically treats Coca-Cola as if it were polluted water—an impurity to be removed so that the water can be made “clean” enough for drinking again. (I’m guessing that, for the foreseeable future, Smits will not be one of those artists, invited by Coca-Cola to design a “limited edition” designer bottle.)

Below, Smits takes a more benign view of “roll-on” deodorant packaging...

(Several more of Helmut Smits works, after the fold...)

Sand Bags & MRE Boxes

“This is where we pour the words into a jar, as if they were water. As if a jar of water was the same as a river. This is where we try to make a coherent narrative out of chaos.”

Nick Flynn
The Ticking Is the Bomb

Just finished reading Nick Flynn’s “The Ticking Is the Bomb”—a memoir in which he traces the connective tissue between his life as an expectant American father and the political and cultural implications of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs.

I’ve been a fan of Flynn’s writing since I picked up his first book of poetry, Some Ether at the library a few years back. The Ticking Is the Bomb may be his best work yet. While it might seem a risky gambit to interleave ones own stories in between stories of Iraqi torture victims, the effect is bracing. Rather than just compartmentalizing these disturbing news stories, as we often do, Flynn succeeds in showing how post-9/11 torture policy might just implicate us on a more personal level.

What does it have to do with packaging? Two ubiquitous examples of military packaging played major roles as props in many of the Abu Ghraib photos: the sandbag (re-purposed as a blindfold/hood), and the “meal, ready-to-eat” (MRE) box that detainees were forced to stand on while being subjected to torture. There was also a Huffington Post article about the use of these boxes and their appearance in the background of many of the other photos. (See also: Product Placement at Gitmo)

(More after the fold...)

Car Bottles: 3 Types

1. Car-shaped whisky bottles (photo by Beth Rose)

2. Beer-bottle-shaped cars (photo by Terry Whalebone of a vehicle from the Coors Museum in Burton-onTrent)

3. Bottles made from crashed cars...

 

... as a cautionary highway sign. On left: a Moscow-based crashed-car bottle for a Russian anti-drinking campaign; on right: a crashed-car bottle in Israel by Tel Aviv-based Y&R. (via: Copyranter)

See also: Can Cars: 2 Types

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Kinder Joy’s Dual-Chambered Egg Pack

Photo from SmALl CloUd ...'s Flickr Photostream

Kinder Joy brings several favorite box vox themes together in one package.

1. First off, it’s another egg-pack, fitting nicely into our entirely egg-shaped week—(that, technically, should have begun with the Silly Putty/L’eggs post from last week)—and although Kinder Joy may be sold at Easter, the company, by no means, confines their marketing efforts to that time of year.

2. It’s another thermoformed, single-serve, peel-off pack in a metaphorical shape. Similar to the bottle & jar-shaped packets and the half-orange-shaped packs from earlier this month. In fact, Kinder Joy’s dual structure—one half for the edible treat; one half for the prize—is exactly like that of Alberto Ghirardello’s Salvo concept (where two halves of an orange break apart to form two separate containers).

3. Kinder Joy (like Kinder Surprise) is a “surprise package” and includes the classic, question-mark styling, typical of that tradition.

Photo on right (revealing prize) is from P.J.S.'s Flickr Photostream

(Case-packs & TV commercials , after the fold...)

Buckfast Blowback

Photo by Kieran Dodds via: The New York Times

Some packaging-related content in an article in today’s New York Times...

Paralleling Russia’s battles with alcoholism—(see: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Campaign)—Scotland’s drinking problems are prompting legislation to try and curb alcohol consumption and its attendant bad behavior.

Unfortunately for Buckfast, the popularity of its caffeine-fortified “tonic wine” (with consumers in this market) also makes it a prominent symbol of a social problem.

...the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them)...

Legislation to curb drinking is of particular interest here in Scotland’s old industrial heartland, or the “Buckfast Belt,” where Buckfast is considered a regional favorite. The drink is so ubiquitous in this working-class town, not far from Glasgow, that some people call it Coatbridge Table Wine (others call it “loopy juice,” or, adding their own twist as they channel Travis Bickle, “Who’re you lookin’ at?” wine.) Buckfast is no newcomer to the market, having become popular in the first half of the 20th century, when it was prescribed by doctors for down-in-the-dumps miners and sold in drugstores.

One person’s helpful mood improver, though, is another’s worryingly effective stimulant. The drink is 15 percent alcohol by volume, a bit stronger than most wines. Also, each 750 milliliter bottle contains as much caffeine as eight cans of Coke.

For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle
By Sarah Lyall, NY Times, February 3, 2010

Interesting that—(like Vimto)—Buckfast began life as a health tonic. Sometime (when there’s time) boxvox must do a round-up of other contemporary products that began as Victorian patent medicines. (Like Coke, for instance.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

As Seen on TV

Blister-pack/clamshell wrap rage is old news, but Larry David manages to give it a terrifying new geopolitical spin when (in Season 7, Episode 2 of Curb Your Enthusiasm) he asks, “What am I, Mohammed Atta, I gotta get a box cutter?”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Groppers

From Mankatt’s Flickr Photostream: a Roche Advertisement from the January 26, 1976 issue of Advertising Age (or maybe it was from Food Product Development Magazine). Either way, it illustrates another reason why an existing package might acquire an added graphic burst.

Roche, with the tagline, “The food improvers,” sought to promote their vitamin additives by suggesting that a product with flagging sales would benefit from a graphic burst with a product claim such as, “Now Fortified with 8 Essential Vitamins.”

I believe that “Groppers” is a fictional product because it seems doubtful that any of Roche’s clients would have wanted to be portrayed as the poster boy for declining sales.

The “how to claim a heath benefit” aspect of this ad also seems pertinent to the recent dialing down of the Smart Choice Program, now under scrutiny from the FDA. (The Smart Choice Program had provided manufacturers with voluntary nutritional guidelines, under which the children’s cereals with the highest sugar content, for example, were somehow able to claim a health benefit.)

(A close up of the Groppers boxes, after the fold...)

Art & Politics of Prescription Pill Bottles

Got an email from MoveOn.org that included this tiny photo of wheelbarrows full of prescription pill bottles. It’s a good example of how packaging can be used as a political symbol. Really, I guess it’s a symbol of health care (or consumption of health care), but in the sense that health care has become a politicized issue, I figure these prescription pill bottles are also a political symbol. There are supposed to be 20,000 of them and each one contains a written message (a message in a bottle) in support of Dawn Smith who has been denied coverage by CIGNA for treatment of her brain tumor. I was surprised not to be able to find other, larger photos of this image. Quantity is powerful and, had it been up to me, I might have wanted to make more of this image. (The video posted yesterday now seems to be doing this.)

On the other hand, maybe 20,000 pill bottles is not really “on point” for their message since Dawn is being denied medical treatment. Mass quantities of pill bottles might tend to suggest the opposite. So many pill bottles implies a prolonged, ongoing treatment of a chronic illness or condition. The pills that you must take for the rest of your life—in order to go on living. And wheelbarrows full of prescription pill bottles, perhaps, speak more to drug company profits—(rather than to insurance company profits).

Another thing that inevitably comes to mind (when you see huge amounts empty packaging) is consumer waste. I’ve written before about my own negative feelings as a consumer of diabetic supplies. Every time I use up another small canister of test strips (or other diabetic supply that I will presumably be using every day for the foreseeable future)—I feel a certain remorse about the packaging waste. Considering Dawn Smith’s situation, I know that I should count myself lucky that my health insurance continues to pay for my medicine and supplies. And yet glimpsing the cost that my insurance company actually shells out for all these supplies, never fails to give me anxiety about how much longer it might continue to do so. It doesn’t strike me as sustainable.

On left: “Corporate DNA” a helix shaped sculpture by Ron Jones; on right: Rocky Stroup’s “Borrowed Time (13 Years of Pill Poppin’)”

Jean Shin’s “Chemical Balance”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Tempest in an Acorn-Shaped Teapot

Acorn brand vending machine photo and ascending price decals from Crow River Trading

Check out this oblique segue: In our previous post we discovered Cynthia Von Buhler’s reliquary prize capsules & vending machine. Her capsules were of the round type but there are also acorn-shaped capsules, as well as a brand of vending machine called “Acorn” made by Oak Manufacturing.

...and speaking of things, acorn: how about all that self-righteous, Republican indignation about that other, more newsworthy Acorn?

The recent Borat-style ‘sting’ by James O’Keefe has put Acorn —(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)— on the defensive in the media, but unlike Sacha Baron Cohen, who, as Borat or as Brüno, sought to expose the prejudices of individuals, O’Keefe and his backers have something more grandiose in mind. His YouTube prank videos of a few guileless Acorn workers, have been packaged presented as if they were an indictment of the entire organization as a whole. O’keefe has created a sufficiently prurient sound bite to scare off Acorn’s funding & support and putting its CEO and Chief Organizer, Bertha Lewis onto a mainstream media hot seat.

I met Bertha Lewis when she was a fellow homesteader in the same building in the South Bronx. Living there (and then fighting to remain there) was, for me, just an instinctive response to the 1980s escalation of rents in Manhattan. For Bertha, however, it became more than that. Yes, she too needed an affordable place to live, but it was through her dedication to the various shared struggles of tenants in that building—(rebuilding a collapsed courtyard, unclogging the building’s sewer, securing legal representation in housing court, etc.)— that, I believe, she came to really embrace “housing rights” as a core principle.

Ms. Lewis and her friends moved into the building in 1983 and fixed it up, paying rent to a man who claimed to be the landlord. After two years, they found out they had “been snookered,” Ms. Lewis said. The city tried to oust the occupants as squatters but they resisted, forming a tenants’ association and winning in court. Ms. Lewis became their spokeswoman, reaching out to reporters and persuading William M. Kunstler to take on the case. “I was just trying to save my home,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about organizing. You just learn this stuff, and I learned the hard way.”

New York Times, March 14, 2001

Eventually my wife and I gave up and we left the space that we had worked so hard to fix up, while Bertha and others stayed on to fight the good fight. We were delighted when we learned that she had become head of Acorn and I remember hearing her on NPR warning about predatory lending practices years before all those sub-prime mortgages, bundled into “toxic assets” brought down the entire world’s financial system.

I cringed in 1989 when President Bush (senior) invoked his “thousand points of light” rhetoric, citing volunteerism as a better alternative to any humane or humanitarian government-run assistance. Knowing myself well enough to know that I am not and never have been a “point of light,” it strikes me as horribly ironic, that Bertha Lewis should be now scapegoated by the right wing. Here is the one person I know who actually does exhibit the “volunteer spirit” that the metaphor was supposedly meant to inspire. What if they were to succeed in crushing Acorn? Who would they like to have step up and help poor people? Big government?

See what Rachel Maddow has to say about the Acorn controversy:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(See Bertha Lewis on The Colbert Report and some acorn-related packaging, after the fold...)

S.O.S at the 1959 Kitchen Debate

In the OP-Ed section today’s NY Times, William Safire has a fascinating account of how he came to take the iconic photo of Nixon & Khrushchev discussing the kitchen of the “typical American home” in the 1959 exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Awesome product placement for S.O.S (and for future Russian leader, Leonid Brezhnev, as well). Some excerpts:

I was in that kitchen, not because I then had anything to do with Nixon, the exhibition’s official host, but as a young press agent for the American company that built the house. The exhibit was designed to show Russians that free enterprise produced goods that made life better for average Americans...

Nixon: “I want to show you this kitchen. It’s like those of houses in California. See that built-in washing machine?”

Khrushchev: “We have such things.”

Nixon: “What we want to do is make more easy the life of our housewives.”

Khrushchev: “We do not have the capitalist attitude toward women.”

... Because the Russian press had derided the American claim that the house was affordable to workers — calling it “a Taj Mahal” — Nixon noted that this house cost $14,000, and a government-guaranteed veterans mortgage made it possible for a steelworker earning $3 an hour to buy it for $100 a month. Khrushchev was sarcastic: “We have peasants who also can afford to spend $14,000 for a house.”

... originally slugged “the Sokolniki summit” but Harrison was willing to change that slug-line to the equally alliterative “kitchen conference” at my plea (my client was the house builder, not Nixon and certainly not the Russian park).

... A few hours after the kitchen conference, at our ambassador’s residence, I was introduced to Nixon, who showed his grasp of capitalism’s priorities by commenting, “We really put your kitchen on the map, didn’t we?”

William Safire NY Times
The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen
NY Times, July 23, 2009

Funny how “modern conveniences” and consumer packaged goods figured into the idealogical debates of that period...

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Radioactive Gag Gift Packaging

The last chapter of Jerry Jankowski’s book, Shelf Space (modern package design, 1945-1960), is about “gag gifts.” These are usually conceptual affairs, in the sense that—(although the gag may be sort of dumb)—as a product, it’s little more than an idea contained in the package. One product featured in this “canned laughter” section of Jankowski’s book is a can of “Genuine Los Angeles Smog.” (See photos below)

From The Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection, this can of “Original Canned Radiation” is obviously the same basic concept. Selling an empty can of air as a sort of rueful attempt at finding humor in the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

“Canned Radiation” from Three Mile Island produced  by Brenster Enterprises of Etters Pennsylvania.

This was probably the most popular souvenir associated with the accident at Three Mile Island.

The six suggested uses indicated on the label were:

1. Remove label and tell your enemy its laughing gas.
2. Energy free night light (illuminates in darkness).
3. Mix with cold cream for that radiant beauty.
4. Instant male sterilization (sniff twice daily).
5. Use as a room air freshener.
6. Toothpaste recipe: mix 3 to 1 ratio with basking soda, for ever glowing smile.

ORAU Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection

 

The funny thing is, several of those bulleted points above are ideas that have actually been tried in the past for serious, non-gag products. (See: Radioactive Packaging)

Nice smog can from eBay, circa 1968 (“Buy It Now” price : $49.95)

(A different label design for “Genuine Los Angeles Smog,” after the fold...)

Gun-Shaped Bottles

Gun-shaped Hijos de Villa Tequila bottle: the lower photo (above) is from Eddie Quinones’s Flickr Photostream

The gun-shaped Hijos de Villa Tequila bottle was getting a lot of attention online last year. Old news from Johnny-come-lately, Box Vox, right? I know, but looking into it now, I’m a little surprised at how many other gun-shaped, glass bottles there are to be found. Some of which are even older.

These two gun-shaped candy bottles are from Ruby Lane. (Vintage packaging from the days when kids were encouraged to play with guns.)

Although I’ve touched on the topic of bottles as a weapon—(think: barroom brawl)—I hadn’t considered “weapons” to be one of the fundamental packaging metaphors. (See: Packaging as Metaphor) I don’t know, maybe I missed something...  “In the battle of the brands, packaging is a weapon.” or “The package is a not-so-secret, deadly weapon with which to annihilate the competition.” (Or something like that.)

Pistola Bucanero "Mocambo" 1821—a buccaneer-pistol-shaped rum bottle (Note: gun-shaped bottles are one of those packages that, themselves, require packaging.)

(More gun-shaped bottles, after the jump...)

Another baby found in a Timberland shoe box

Baby shoe box photos from KidsDesignerWear-UK. (This is not the box in which the baby girl was found in Hempstead, and is only shown here for illustration purposes & for flat-footed irony.)

Yep. This is the second time I’m quoting a Daily News story about a baby in a Timberland box. (The earlier story was from September of 2007. See: Packaging and Moral Turpitude.) 

The girl was less than a day old when she was discovered by a man who heard a noise and peeked inside a Timberland work boots box around 9 p.m. Sunday in Hempstead, L.I.

Baby, less than a day old, found in shoebox in lobby of Long Island apartment building
The NY Daily News, 6/22/09

And from the NY Post:

A newborn baby girl was found alive in a Timberland shoebox in the entrance to a Long Island apartment building, police said today...

A breathing hole had been cut in the middle of the lid.

NEWBORN ABANDONED IN LI BUILDING
The NY Post, 6/22/09

Poor Timberland. Some news reports just say “shoe box,” but most of the reportage makes a point of including this key, brand-name detail. Is this just to give the story verisimilitude?  Or is it a commentary on the mother’s values? As if to say: “Look, she can afford to buy expensive Timberland boots, but she can’t afford to take care of her child.”