Box Vox

packaging as content

September 30, 2009

Shmoo Plug-Bait Box

ShmooLureBox

Another fishing lure. The Shmoo Plug-Bait. (All photos from Fishing for History)

We’ve alluded to shmoos here at least once before, and we will again. As a creature “who loved to be eaten by humans and tasted like any food desired” Al Capp’s shmoo would seem to be the model for guilt-free consumption. (The product wants to be consumed.) As for the Shmoo fishing lure:

In upstate New York, Richard Balch, director of one of the largest tackle manufacturers in the country, got caught up in Shmoomania like everyone else. Unlike most, however, Balch had an idea, and that idea would morph into one of the neatest fishing lures of the post-World War II era: The Shmoo…

The Shmoo bait was a neat idea. Clearly, like all Shmoo products, H-I paid a royalty for use of the L’il Abner figures directly to Al Capp. Capp himself was one of the pioneers of licensing and merchandising for cartoon figures. In a successful $14 million lawsuit against King Features Syndicate in 1947, he wrested control over his creations and thus benefited financially from its merchandising, unlike so many other less fortunate cartoonists.

Denis Kitchen © 2004
Shmoo (not Schmoo) Facts & Info

(Photo of Shmoo lures, after the fold…)

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September 29, 2009

Ted McDonah’s Recyclures

Fishing lures by Arizona-based metalsmith, Tedd McDonah made from recycled cans. Recylures. I’m no fisherman, but I sure like these as objets d’art. For sale on Etsy. (Rollover photo above to see his stockpile of used metal containers.)

(via Unconsumption)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 28, 2009

Bottle Fish, Can Fish

BottleCanFish

Left: Canada Dry beverage ad (from Mississippi Pack Ratz); right: vintage Chicken of the Sea ad (from I don’t remember where)

The idea of product packages swimming around in the open sea must have seemed like a cute, whimsical notion in the 1950s. Nowadays, with the negative associations of beach pollution and the floating “garbage patch,“ it’s hard to imagine anyone in advertising floating this concept as a way of promoting consumer packaged goods.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 25, 2009

Coke Bottle Glasses

CokeBottleGlasses2Photo on left via Pop Sop; photo on right from Cherry Tree Vintage Etsy Shop

Coke bottle glasses. Two kinds.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 24, 2009

All the Young Dudes Original Album Cover Art

Dude

“Dude ’72” photo by Mick Rock (Camden Town, Summer 1972)

For obvious reasons I really like Mick Rock’s photo of this English boy, outside with his cardboard guitar. (I'm guessing the kayak must have been for Regent’s Canal since I don’t see any other bodies of water on a map of Camden Town.)

We went to the opening of Mick Rock’s Glam! show on Staten Island a couple weeks ago. This photo was there.

The original cover photo for Mott The Hoople’s classic Bowie-produced album “All The Young Dudes” … Why it wasn’t used I can’t remember, nor can Ian Hunter, must have been a chemical shift.

Mick Rock
Glam! An Eyewitness Account

A chemical shift or just a really bad executive/creative decision? The album cover that they ultimately went with—(with a 1940s-style illustration of some English public school chaps in suits)—was so crummy by comparison, it was embarrassing. (I don’t even want to stink up the blog by showing it; you can go here to see it, if you want.)

In my second year at college, I remember going to a Providence record store to buy that album and just cringing when my girlfriend at the time held it up and, from across the store, called out, “Randy, here’s Mott the Hoople!”

I think I might have held my head a little bit higher, if the English boy with the cardboard guitar had been on that album cover instead.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 23, 2009

Guitar with Packaging Skin

GuitarSkin

ElProducto-420

Originally the idea was that I’d be singing songs about packaging & playing a cigar box guitar on top of the landfill. I had even found an El Producto cigar box on eBay that I thought particularly suitable —(conflating stringed instruments: harp & guitar)—and I planned on commissioning my guitar-builder friend, Ted Crocker to turn this cigar box into a 6-string guitar for me. Unfortunately, The budget would not stretch far enough for that. So I decided instead to just give the Edison Volt a sort of packaging skin. (See: package as skin)

The skin in this case: a corrugated Tropicana shipping case. At first I was thinking of using something more pop and super-graphic. (like an economy size Tide box) But then it occurred to me that that sort of iconic branding could easily overshadow the whole enterprise, making it seem like an event sponsored by that brand. The upside down shipping carton seemed like a way around that, and it happened to coordinate with the brown kraft labels of the DIY CD packaging.

Although box vox had very little to say about last year’s Tropicana branding brouhaha, I could not resist referencing it now in my own small way. (The new orange-shaped cap serves as my tone control knob.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 22, 2009

Tri-Ply’s Right Triangle Box

133_boxes-in-a-row

Via Packaging Digest: a right triangle prism-shaped box for Lakeland Tri-Ply pots and pans. Designed by UK-based Nicepond, these close-packing boxes set themselves apart by making unusually efficient use of space and materials. (Also opens up a number of different display options.)

133_triangle-frontsbacksabove

(Package display options, after the fold…)

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September 21, 2009

Package-Shaped Transistor Radios

Radios

Marlboro & Uniflow radios from Michael Jack’s Transistor Radios Flickr Photostream; PET Evaporated Milk & Folgers Coffee radios from Gasoline Alley Antiques; the others from eBay

I was on the radio last night. I got to sing two packaging songs on Rich Russo’s Anything, Anything on NY station, WRXP. (“Expiration Date” & “This Landfill is Your Landfill”)

We’ve featured a couple package-shaped transistor radios in the past—(here & here)—but now seemed like a good time for a bigger roundup of these advertising radios.

(Another packaging/radio after-thought, after the jump…)

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September 18, 2009

Trash Tracking & Landfill Packaging

TrashTagging Upper left photo from M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory site; bottom left and right photos by Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times

“… once the product has been used up, and the package is empty, it becomes suddenly visible once more. This time, though, it is trash that must be discarded or recycled. This instant of disposal is the time when people are most aware of packages. It is a negative moment, like the end of a love affair, and what’s left seems to be a horrid waste.”

Thomas Hines, The Total package

The moment of packaging disposal may be a downer for the consumer, but after the garbage and recycling trucks pull away from the curb, those “suddenly visible” packages become invisible once more. What happens next is something that many people wonder about.

Elizabeth Royte, in her book, Garbageland, did the environmental sleuth-work of trying to track down exactly where her family’s garbage came to rest, after it left the curb.

Trash Tracking
Now, in yesterday’s NY Times, I see that researchers have begun using electronic tracking devices attached to individual pieces of trash to learn more about the fate of of what we discard into our municipal waste streams:

Through the project, overseen by M.I.T.’s Senseable City Laboratory, 3,000 common pieces of garbage, mostly from Seattle, are to be tracked through the waste disposal system over the next three months. The researchers will display the routes in real time online and in exhibitions opening at the Architectural League of New York on Thursday and the Seattle Public Library on Saturday…

Brett Stav, a senior planning and development specialist for the Seattle Public Utilities, which collects about 2,100 tons of trash and recyclables a day, said that aside from the help with logistics, he saw “tremendous educational value” in the experiment.

“There is this hidden world of trash, and there are ramifications to the choices that people make,” Mr. Stav said. “People just take their trash and put it on the curb and they forget about it and don’t think about all the time and energy and money put into disposing of it.”

Mireya Navarro
Following Trash and Recyclables on Their Journey
NY Times, September 16, 2009

(Liquid Soap bottle tracking map, landfill packaging song, and more, after the fold…)

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September 17, 2009

Damnation & Diet Delight

DD

In the 1950s, Diet Delight used an anthro-pack mascot in their advertising. Sort of a counter-intuitive shape for a diet product spokes-model, but I guess this was before the days when tin cans could have waistlines. (See: package as body)

Perhaps she’s meant to represent the “before” concept. Still, she seems to be condemned to her own special brand of hell… her feet stuck to a bathroom scale, perpetually checking her weight for all eternity. (Or all of the 1950s, at any rate.)

Diet-DelightPhotos from Flickr & Ebay. (here, here, here, here & here…)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 16, 2009

IlliteRAT with Alpha-bits



IlliteRAT ©1976 David Wilder (starring my pet rat, Lucky)

Alpha-bitsBox751Not the first time we’ve mentioned rats (or mice) here on box vox and, as previously disclosed, I myself, once had a pet rat. Given to me by another rodent-loving classmate at RISD, “Lucky” played a starring role in my friend, David Wilder’s video, illiteRAT. Hadn’t seen this tape in over 30 years, but I think its conceptual rigor still holds up.

And it was nice for me to see the little feller again, after all this time. (I don’t really remember what the cereal box looked like that Lucky’s Alpha-bits came in. Lets just say, for arguments sake, that it was the one on the left—photo from The Imaginary World—with the mouth-shaped, faux die cut window.)

In my last year at school, I lived in an office building in downtown Providence where I’d let Lucky scamper, dog-like, about the loft. It’s surprising how frisky a rat can be.

I recall eating a lot of ice-cream cones one Summer. (This was before I found out I was diabetic.) I got into a habit of methodically reducing the size of the ice-cream cone—keeping it in classic proportions—until I had formed a miniature, rat-size ice-cream cone. This, I would then present to Lucky and he’d grab it in his hands and eagerly finish it off. (Sort of fractal, now that I think of it…)

Sadly, my free-range policy of giving Lucky the run of the place, ultimately led to his demise. Turned out there were dusty old trays of rat poison under the radiators, that I didn’t know were there.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 15, 2009

Klein Bottles

NestedKleinBottles

Nested Klein bottles: a bottle containing a bottle containing a bottle… 

This is one of a series of glass Klein bottles made by Alan Bennett in 1995 for the Science Museum, London. It consists of three Klein bottles, one inside another. A Klein bottle is a surface which has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot properly be constructed in three dimensions. In the series Alan Bennett made Klein bottles analogous to Mobius strips with odd numbers of twists greater than one.

from The Science Museum in South Kensington

As I dimly understand the Klein bottle, it’s a sort of 3-dimensional diagram of a 4-dimensional object. In the 4th dimension the bottle would not need to intersect itself. Does the Klein bottle have any practical application in beverage packaging?



Futurama clip via Cocina y Matemáticas

(More Klein bottles by Alan Bennett, after the manifold…)

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September 14, 2009

Cream Top Milk Bottles

CreamTopBottles Bottle photos from DairyAntiques.com

A special Milk bottle shape from the 1930s with a cream-separating chamber.

“From the same bottle, either cream or milk instantly available—rich, whole milk for the children, or golden, thick cream… Have your milk delivered in the new, modern, sanitary Cream Top Milk Bottle—insert the handy separator and!… the cream pours off, the milk stays in the bottle.”

–Cream Top Bottle Corporation, Albany, NY

CreamTop-Promo

Left: Cream Top ad from 1935 issue of Good Housekeeping Magazine (from the Gallery of Graphic Design); lower right: another Packaging Zippo (from the Zippo Gallery)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 11, 2009

Mick Rock: Glam! at Show Gallery

BowieIggyLouReed-700
©1972 Mick Rock: David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed at the Dorchester Hotel

Mick Rock is having an exhibit at the Show Gallery, here on Staten Island, “Glam!” which opens tomorrow night. As the photographer who “shot the seventies” it isn’t hard to find iconic album packaging that he had a hand in. David Bowie's Space Oddity. Iggy Pop’s Raw Power. Lou Reed’s Transformer. I guess I could have made a photo-triptych of those 3 covers and used it at the top of this post. But I decided to go instead with the photo above, of the three of them all together during glam rock’s heyday. (A copy of this photo fetched $1,250 at a Christie’s auction in 2008.)

For me, these three are pretty much the leading glam-rock guys of the period, but, hey, if you’re into Marc Bolan he’s here too… (on the T-Rex t-shirt that Iggy’s wearing).

What does this photo have to do with packaging? Note the cigarette pack in Iggy’s teeth. I don’t know if Bowie ever smoked (he did), but we’ve already covered tobacco & Lou Reed. (See: Arents Medal)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 11, 2009

Coke Bottle Water Pipe

CokeBottleHashPipe

From the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford: a Coke Bottle Water Pipe—one of the selected “English objects,” given a detailed biography on their website. Some excerpts of this object’s biography follow below. (The entire article can be read: here)

At the back of the Pitt Rivers museum in the far right-hand corner is a case full of different smoking devices. Number 1999.41.1 is described on the label as a “water pipe for smoking marijuana”. Marina de Alarcon, a curatorial assistant at the museum, bought the pipe on the 25th of November 1999, from the Bombay Emporium on East Oxford’s Cowley Road, and donated it to the collection. The device is fashioned from an empty 330 ml Coca-Cola bottle.

Upon closer examination it is obvious that the contraption is made simply, but is functional as opposed to merely ornamental. For its water jar, the pipe is comprised of a standard, glass Coca-Cola bottle of the iconic shape and design found across the world. Into the neck of the bottle the pipe’s maker inserted simple a bung with a valve, hose and a body valve on top of which is the bowl and plate, as indicated by the diagram.

The markings on the bottle – “Mainland U.K. Distribution Only” – indicate that the pipe was probably made in Britain from a container used in the country. While Coca-Cola is ubiquitous, this particular combination of recycled glass Coke bottle and common laboratory equipment is unusual in the world of water pipes, even those of the homemade variety. By contrast, the most frequently cited instructions found online for fashioning such smoking devices call for using larger, 2-litre plastic bottles. It’s not clear if the smaller water capacity of the Pitt Rivers’ example would affect the pipe’s utility in filtering the smoke.

(More excerpts follow, after the fold…)

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September 10, 2009

Packaging Icons

PackIcons 

Icons by Pixture (Hide Itoh): Tiny pixel mosaics of packages from Hide’s Grocery and Cleaning sets.

Even at this tiny, pixelated size, most of these brands are still recognizable and, yes, iconic.

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

September 9, 2009

Packaging and Music Posters

3PackPosters

Via Packaging Uqam: more evidence of the connection between packaging and pop music. These posters are by Emanuela Grasso for music performances at Montreal’s “Café Campus.” (I like the way her drips here simultaneously reference: graffiti, messy food, & action painting.)

(Another packaging/music poster after the fold…)

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