boomerang

today my dad and i went to a huge wharehouse sale that this vintage store, boomerang was having. while looking around i found a colouring and rhyme book about stokely's vegetables. it's a promotional book for children. not only are the drawings extremely creepy, but the rhymes incredibly awry. the first page is depicting a mother tomato who has too many children so she puts out a sign to sell her children for people to buy and eat and then she decides to name her children. later the book has a wedding of different vegetables and their homes are in stokely cans. all of this is to make children interested in eating stokely vegetables. in the back of the book it tells parents that if they know a young boy or girl that would like a book like this, they can send in 12 stokely labels and recieve one of their own. this makes me feel kind of sad for the advertisers and the people who created this creepy vegetable book, because they thought this book would help them with selling vegetables to children.

though i have noticed a lot of advertisements, commercials and cartoons from a while back are extremely creepy. for instance, i have a dvd of 'the cabinet of dr. caligari' and it has additional features such as a tooth paste commercial and a cartoon where a man's hair falls out one strand at a time and his eyes buldge out of his head. perhaps these cartoons and advertisements did reach the children of the era. in some ways i bet we haven't changed much or perhaps the culture of the past would be utterly appauled by what we subject our children to. either way i am happy i grew up in the time that i did.

here is part of the cover and part of the first rhyme. my scanner is too small so parts of the cover were cropped.