The Comic Book Ad Submarine revealed!
One of the things I love about reading Boing Boing is knowing that I have a sympatico with the writers, who are all within my age group and shared the same experience of media as I did growing up. A good example of this is comic books - we all remember them and in particular, the ads they contained, enticing us to buy cases of plastic soldiers or hiring us to flog seeds or GRIT magazine door to door, or buy novelties and jokes. One of my favourites was the Polaris submarine. For $6.98 you were promised a kid-size submarine that had torpedos and a conning tower, etc. I never went for it but I always wondered. Someone on flickr has finally cracked the code on this one. The first post on BB details a flickrstream of comic book ads from the 1970's. And then today, responding to a plea for a photograph of the genuine. article, a $6.98 Polaris submarine, was answered with a square foto. complete with kid inside no doubt experiencing fits of imagination. Of course, it's cardboard. But check it out! For seven bucks that's a lot of cardboard! Having small children, I know how much fun a cardboard box can be. But a cardboard box in the shape of a submarine? Maybe it wasn't such a rip-off after all!
