Here’s a look at the origins of some of the most popular obsessions from days gone by.
Created by Belgian storybook illustrator Pierre “Peyo” Culliford in 1957, the Smurfs developed followings in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Scandanavia (where the blue creatures were known as Schlumpfe, Puffo, Pitufo, and Smolf, respectively), but they remained more or less unknown in the rest of the world.
Then in 1978, British Petroleum launched an advertising campaign featuring the creatures, which it renamed the Smurfs for the English audience. The ads sparked a Smurf craze in England, prompting an American importer to bring them to America… where they caught the eye of the daughter of the president of NBC. Her enthusiasm prompted dad to order up a Saturday morning Smurf cartoon show for the network. The show became an enormous hit, turning NBC into a Saturday morning juggernaut and launching a Smurf craze in the United States. By 1982 the Smurfs were the biggest-selling toy merchandising line in the country, outselling even E.T. and Star Wars.
In 1984 an executive recruiter named Michael Lerner decided to start his own consumer products business. The only problem: he couldn’t think of any products to sell. Lucky for him, an old college friend told him about a couple who’d just come back from a vacation in Germany, where they’d seen small signs suction-cupped to automobile windows warning motorists to drive carefully because a baby was on board. The couple wanted to start selling the signs in the United States.
Lerner offered them a deal: If they would agree to let him market the signs, he would give them a royalty. Deal! Lerner founded a company called Safety 1st; by the end of 1985 he was selling 500,000 of the little diamond-shaped yellow signs a month. The couple made more than $100,000 for doing absolutely nothing.
Soon imitators stole his idea and swamped the market with humorous signs like “Beam Me Up Scotty” and “Ex-Husband in Trunk.” Lerner couldn’t sue—he didn’t have a patent, but that wasn’t a problem: He just used his Baby On Board profits to branch out into other child-safety products. He eventually took Safety 1st public, and in April 2000 it sold to a Canadian company for $195 million.
…together and they melt at 356°F.
In 1952, a Detroit paint-company owner named Max Klein got together with an artist named Dan Robbins and formed Craft Master, a company that sold the world’s first paint-by-numbers kits. The kits consisted of numbered jars of paint and a rolled-up canvas (later cardboard) stamped with the outline of a painting; each section of the painting had a number that corresponded to a particular color of paint. Price, including paints and brush: $1.79
So who did Klein and Robbins get the idea from? Leonardo da Vinci. “I recalled reading about da Vinci, and when he got large and complicated commissions, he would give numbered patterns to his apprentices to block in areas for him that he’d go back and finish himself,” Robbins explains. “It took two years to get off the ground; then they took off like a rocket.” By 1954 more paint-by-numbers paintings were hanging in American homes than were original works of art.
At the peak of the fad, Craft Master was producing 50,000 kits a day. Their slogan was “Every man a Rembrandt.” Among the Rembrandts: Nelson Rockefeller, Ethel Merman, Andy Warhol, J. Edgar Hoover…and even President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The world’s first toy slot cars were introduced by the Aurora Plastics Company in 1960. Aurora’s cars came with special slotted tracks that kept the cars on the road, thanks to a small projection under the car’s nose that inserted into the slot. Cost: $3.00 to $8.00 per car, or $20–40 for an entire racing set, which made them affordable for just about everyone. The cars went up to 600 mph in scale, and since the “drivers” were in continuous control of their vehicles’ speeds, the cars were more challenging—and more fun—to operate than toy cars had ever been.
Because of all of this, the cars became hugely popular. Entrepreneurs built huge multilevel slot-car racing centers that competed with pinball arcades for America’s pocket change, and home enthusiasts spent $1,500 or more building their own elaborate speedways at home. In all, Americans spent $100 million on slot cars and tracks in 1963—more than they spent on model rail-roads—and by 1965 more than 3.5 million Americans were racing slot cars on a regular basis. For a time it seemed that slot cars might even become more popular than bowling, but the fad didn’t last long—sales dropped off sharply in 1967 and never recovered.
Standard English: During his lifetime, Shakespeare’s last name was spelled 83 different ways.
Dihydroxyacetone is a drug that’s used as an antidote for cyanide poisoning. It has a side effect: It stains human skin brown on contact. A sun worshipper named John Andre noticed this in the late 1950s and decided to mix the medicine with alcohol and fragrances and sell it as a self-tanning aftershave called Man-Tan. Andre sold $3 million worth of the stuff in 1960, giving both aftershave and suntan lotion companies quite a scare. They needn’t have worried: paint-on tans were just a flash in the pan, and sales “virtually disappeared” the following year. (Update: Man-tan is still gone, but thanks to the established link between sunlight and skin cancer, paint-on tans are more popular than ever.)
In 1948 cartoonist Al Capp added a new character to his L’il Abner comic strip: the shmoo, a strange creature, described as “a cross between Casper the Ghost and a misshapen dinosaur.” In Capp’s comic-strip world, the shmoos were as much a part of the food supply as they were a part of the story line: they laid eggs, produced butter, and gave milk in glass bottles. If you broiled them, they turned into steak; if you boiled them, they turned into chicken.
And if you made a toy out of them, manufacturers learned in the late l940s, they sold by the millions. Companies made fortunes selling shmoo ashtrays, clocks, piggy banks, pencil sharpeners, clothing, candy, and even shmoo meat products. By 1950 more than $25 million worth of shmoo items had been sold, yet for some reason, Capp decided to write the characters out of the story line. He created a “shmooicide squad” that gunned down every single shmoo in the strip, and the fad died out soon after that.
The skin of a tiger shark is 10 times as strong as ox hide.