Your childhood innocence was a corporate psy-op. Pass the popcorn.
Toy maven Ira H. Gallen's fascinating collection of nearly 100 TV toy ads from the '50s and '60s will be as much fun for adults as the toys themselves were in their childhood. Often hilarious, often spooky, these spots offer a rich sampling of period corporate media tactics, and a pop-psych peek into the juvenile world from which an entire counterculture was to spring.
Editing
Jarring juxtaposition of saccharine ads creates dark irony.
Production
Raw vintage footage preserved in pristine laserdisc transfer.
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Ira H. Gallen was a pioneering media archivist who amassed over 100,000 TV commercials; this laserdisc release was among the first to treat advertising as legitimate cultural artifact.
Many ads feature toys from companies now defunct or absorbed—Marx, Ideal, Remco—making this a graveyard of forgotten American manufacturing.
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