Following World War Two, American consumers were bombarded by an ever-increasing amount of advertising for a vast array of new products. This book looks at the unabashed consumerism of the 1950s, examining the adverts which reflected the affluent and dynamic lives of Americans in this decade.

Second in a series of books featuring advertising by era, All-American Ads of the 50s offers page after page of products that made up the happy-days decade. The start of the cold war spurred a buying frenzy and a craze for new technology that required ad campaigns to match. The nuclear age left its mark all over the advertisements, with a spotlight on planes, rockets, and even mushroom clouds. Shiny, big, beautiful cars abound, styled to keep up with the space age. Editor Jim Heimann, in his essay "From Poodles to Presley, Americans Enter the Atomic Age," explains: "Car designers came up with exaggerated tail fins for automobiles to express this new accelerated speed." Modernist home interiors look slick and shiny with their molded plastic furniture and linoleum floors. While clothing and furniture styles look strangely contemporary--a testament to our current obsession with vintage--some things have definitely changed. A baby sells Marlboro cigarettes! Also included are chapters on movies, food, and travel. --J.P. Cohen.

Provides a pictorial tour of advertisements from the 1970s, including categories such as automobiles, travel, interiors, entertainment, fashion, alcohol, business, consumer products, and food and beverages.

"Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century--by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating "Fall Guy" character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack's pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering "showrunners" combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors' products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932's depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s"--Provided by publisher.

John Wade grew up in the 1950s, a decade that has since been dubbed the 'golden age of science fiction'. It was a wonderful decade for science fiction, but not so great for young fans. With early television broadcasts being advertised for the first time as 'unsuitable for children' and the inescapable barrier of the 'X' certificate in the cinema barring anyone under the age of sixteen, the author had only the radio to fall back on - and that turned out to be more fertile for the budding SF fan than might otherwise have been thought. Which is probably why, as he grew older, rediscovering those old TV broadcasts and films that had been out of bounds when he was a kid took on a lure that soon became an obsession.For him, the super-accuracy and amazing technical quality of today's science fiction films pale into insignificance beside the radio, early TV and B-picture films about people who built rockets in their back gardens and flew them to lost planets, or tales of aliens who wanted to take over, if not our entire world, then at least our bodies. This book is a personal account of John Wade's fascination with the genre across all the entertainment media in which it appeared - the sort of stuff he revelled in as a young boy - and still enjoys today.