Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Dive - Dive - Dive


About July 2001, Google launched their Google Images site, but with only 250,000,000 indexed images, you really couldn't find pictures of things that were in your mind or memory.  Now, with over 10,000,000,000 indexed images, you can find almost anything that you recall seeing years ago.

The picture above is one of those things that a former 10 or 12-year old boy in 1955-58 would recall.  It was the post-WWII period when our fathers, most of them WWII veterans, were in their 30s and our country's leaders were positioning us for the Cold War, where we would arm, but not shoot...not officially, that is.  There were frequent sonic booms overhead and the early TV broadcasts consisted of a lot of WWII films and Victory at Sea on Sunday evenings...there was a lot of war stuff in the public consciousness, even the consciousness of a 10-year old.

Kelloggs ran a Corn Flakes commercial that featured a nuclear submarine! as a give away.  But the dumb thing didn't really work like the commercial showed.  You would stuff some baking powder under it, a gas bubble would form, the sub would rise, then roll over, fart the bubble, and drop like a rock, then repeat the process until the baking powder was gone.  It was one of my first introductions to the disconnect between sales puffery and reality of the deliverable.

I seem to recall commercials with klaxons and a Clark Gable-like commander yelling, DIVE-DIVE-DIVE.  It may have been my imagination, but then again, my bathtub fleet consisted of floating bottle tops I could sink in various naval engagements using a canon made from a water-filled nose spray bottle.  I liked the bottle caps better.


Dive--Dive---Dive !!

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