logos

Friday, June 14, 2013

Friday, June 14, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday, June 14, 2013

It’s checkout time at the City Motor Hotel

For SaleA neighbour with a truck said he’d help her move, but Kim Coulas has been waiting all day. When she tries calling, his phone is off.

“I’m screwed,” she says, removing a cigarette from a large Ziploc bag. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

It’s 4:30 p.m. on Thursday. City staff are standing in the parking lot, waiting for the keys to the City Motor Hotel. It was supposed to be vacant by now.

Romolo D’Angelo, the city’s director of facilities management and capital programs, says 10 rooms were occupied when they arrived in the morning.

Most people left without incident, but Coulas is one of two still here. Her belongings are packed and stacked in duffel bags and wicker baskets outside her room, but she can’t move them alone.
She calls another friend and waits some more.

Coulas says she doesn’t know where she’ll go when they show up. She’s been here for a month, ever since she and her husband divorced and she left her rented house.

“Divorce was easier,” she says of living at the hotel.

She’s been here once before — a decade ago, when she moved to Hamilton from Beaver Creek, Yukon. She says the same people owned it, but it was a lot nicer then.

“They just took this place and they ran it into the ground,” she says, pushing a busted pane of Plexiglas out of the window of her room and leaning through. “Every cent they could get out of it they milked it and that was it. It’s a shame.” (Source: The Hamilton Spectator)

February 28, 2007

There’s nothing new about drawing parodies of common logos and advertisements. The most popular thing to do these days is to satirize well known current movie logos and add a humourous political or social twist. The most recent parody I drew came when the mostly forgotten remake of that campy classic movie the Poseidon Adventure hit the theatres. With regard to ad parodies, off the top of my head I recall Osama de Toilette products, and East End Hamilton cereal.

I couldn’t help but recall as I drew today’s parody of Downy Fabric Softener some stickers that I vaguely remember as a kid growing up in the 70’s. Until I did a Google search using keywords like ‘sticker’, ‘ad’, ‘parody’, and ‘1970’s’, I never even knew that the things I was recalling in the deep recesses of my childhood memories actually had a name: Wacky Packs. Here are some examples:

Yep, cheesey, gross, kinda dumb, but a nice introduction to innocent youthful rebellion against mass marketing in the 1970’s. And there are hundreds of them, many of them created and drawn by an artist working for the Topps bubblegum company — Art Spiegelman — which quite frankly, is news to me.

From the website, wackypackages.org, there’s a reprint of an article in the Oct. 1, 1973 issue of New York magazine which best describes what Wacky Packs were all about. Here’s an excerpt:

What are Wacky Packages?, you may well ask. Putting it simply – too simply in fact – they are a new twist on the classic bubble gum card, that hoary ruse created to sell the uneatable to the unbearable. They are also, in a time when polls show public belief in institutions at an all-time low, seedling skepticism in its purest form. If a stick-on bubble gum card can take an old faithful cereal like Cap’n Crunch, change it into Cap’n Crud, and become the Munchkin madness of the year, maybe somebody up there better take a long look at what’s turning the kiddies on – and off.

In their minor art form, Wacky Packages are revolutionary. Gone are the jocks and rock stars, the traditional card ploys. Wacky Pack puns are the Mad magazine effect leaking sideways into the under-culture. Yet when they were tried out by the Topps Chewing Gum Company six years ago, under the guidance of former manager of product development Stan Hart (a regular contributor to Mad), they went nowhere. Now the times are obviously right. Watergatian Weltschmerz is nibbling the collective unconscious, and Wacky Packages are selling rampant with their put-downs of products that kids have had thrown at them and into them daily by TV and Mom. From air-ball breakfast cereals to dishwashing detergents that make ladies beautiful, familiarity seems finally to be breeding contempt – and a generation of gripers.

Be sure to checkout the many more examples of wacky packs / vintage ad parodies on the Internet.

FEEDBACK

Holy cow, Mr. Mackay, I didn’t realize how much you have veered to the right.

Your accusations of Dion being “soft” on terrorism are the exact same perceptions of the opposition that Mr. Harper has been propagating ad nauseam. Not only are these perceptions extreme, but the imagery you have chosen in your cartoon is intensely personal and vile. You should join Ramirez, the neocon American editorial cartoonist, as an embedded mouthpiece for entrenched conservative policies.

No, I am not a Liberal.

– A. Abbott (March 2, 2007)

——

I used to skip lunch and buy wacky packs. Those were the days, I guess I had about 350 of them. Not including the ones I stuck on the walls, car, bikes, school hallways. bathrooms. They were great. Of course I bought the whole new set from an e-bay auction, they are still cute, but nothing can compare with opening a new pack of wackey packs hoping to complete the set.

– dwells (March 6, 2007)