Frankie's Holiday

The Monster is a reliable TV pitchman, a Halloween favorite, here making a rare Christmastime appearance. Beautifully done, genuinely touching, this one just might be an instant classic.

Frankie’s Holiday was created by TBWA for Apple, with a judiciously cast Brad Garrett — all of 6’8” and deep-voiced — as The Monster. Garrett is perhaps best remembered for his supporting role in the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond.

The Christmas electrodes are a nice touch.

Happy Holidays!

Subway Frankenstein

If you are a book reader, you never travel alone. That’s the message from Bookish, a promotional website launched in February 2013. Here, a reader shares a subway ride with Scarlett O’Hara, Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein’s Monster. The art — artist unfortunately unidentified — was featured last year in one of a series of subway ads in New York. Tag line read, “Give your ride more character”.  

Memorable Characters page on Bookish.com

With thanks to Joseph Grego.

Related:

Become Frankenstein

Frankenstein's Vodka

The classic, flattop Frankenstein Monster has been hawking Heineken, Twizzlers, Shinola and all manner of products for some 50 years by now. Here’s an early pitch, from Halloween of 1967, advertising the Smirnoff Bloody Mary.

The Smirnoff brand, originally produced by a Russian immigrant in Bethel, Connecticut, effectively introduced vodka to North American consumers. The small-scale outfit was taken over in 1933 by Heublein’s, a distiller that had survived through Prohibition by selling A1 steak sauce, but vodka, rebranded as “white whiskey”, was a tough sell and it would take another twenty years before it caught on. Heublein’s innovative president, John Gilbert Martin, repositioned vodka as a cocktail ingredient to be mixed with anything and everything from beef bouillon to ginger beer and launched a now legendary series of glossy magazine ads featuring a who’s who of contemporary celebrities such as Groucho Marx, Julie London, Robert Goulet, Benny Goodman and Della Reese. The most celebrated ads included one with Buster Keaton, and repeat appearances by a young standup comic, Woody Allen.

A late entry in the long-running campaign, the Frankenstein ad stars Paul Ford as “the friendly monster”. A character actor with a long list of choice screen credits, Ford was best known for his stint as the clueless, long-suffering Colonel Hall opposite the flimflamming Sergeant Bilko of the hugely popular Phil Silvers Show (1955-59).

The heavily retouched photo has Ford wearing a high forehead and wig, with the green color most likely painted on top of the still. In fact, the head may have been patched on — dare I say Frankenstein-like — to a body double. A similar trick appears to have been pulled in an ad for the Smirnoff Screwdriver featuring Vincent Price, seen reflected in a small mirror, otherwise sitting with his back (or perhaps the double's back) to the camera. 

Twizzlers Frankenstein

The Frankenstein Monster is an accomplished commercial pitchman, and he’s likely to pull extra duty at Halloween-time. Case in point, here’s a really nice, new commercial, currently in heavy rotation on North American TV.  

The animated ad was created for the Hershey Company’s Twizzlers by the Arnold agency. They also did a neat King Kong version in 2012. 

(And please note, I posted this as information. It is not a paid ad or product placement.)

Reddi-Wip Frankenstein

A Halloween-time ad from 1997 puts a stitched-up can of Reddi-Wip on the laboratory slab, ready to “bring your dessert creations to life”.

Reddi-Wip is whipped cream in a can, its ingredients startlingly propelled into instant edible foam by nitrous oxide. Not only is it a dessert topping, it can also be piled on a paper plate for a pie-in-the-face gag, or used to decorate a newlywed’s car.    

With thanks, from the collection of Mr. Fritz Frising.

Related:
Absolut Frankenstein
The Beer of Frankenstein

Frankenstein Ads

The Frankenstein Monster has enjoyed a busy and enduring career as an advertising pitchman. Here’s a recent ad for T-Mobile spoofing AT&T's TV spots where an adult interacts with children. This one, substituting The Monster, is shot on a fantastic laboratory set, featuring a stylistic mashup meeting of a classic Universal-style flattop Monster and a Hammer/Cushing-like Dr. Frankenstein. There is also a fake "outtakes" video.


Casting back to 2010, click the image or follow the link to Ads of the World and watch a witty ad for the Crunch Fitness chain of gyms. This one's very much worth a look.

With thanks to Joe Thompson.


Related:
The Pitch of Frankenstein
The Beer of Frankenstein
Frankenstein Gets Relief

Absolut Frankenstein

Launched in 1980, the advertising series for the Swedish-made, French-owned Absolut vodka brand is the world’s longest running ad campaign, yielding over 1500 variations based, simply, on the distinctive shape of its bottle.

The Absolut Shelley Frankenstein bottle and the Absolut Karloff ad were both created by the campaign’s original photographer, Steve Bronstein, who would produce some 200 ads for the campaign. From a pre-computer era, these are actual photographed props.

Among other genre references, an Absolut Wells ad shows an invisible bottle (!), and the Absolut Transylvania ad features a mountaintop castle with a bottle-shaped turret.

Steve Bronstein’s website.
A fabulous gallery of Absolut ads.

Related:
The Beer of Frankenstein

Become Frankenstein

Reading means identifying with characters in a book, becoming someone else, as suggested by this poster, one of a series, promoting the Mint Vinetu bookstore in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The reader here identifies with Mary’s Monster, right down to her green fingernails. Another poster in the series features H.G.Wells’ The Invisible Man. The reader wears a turban, matching the title character’s bandaged face. Other titles spotlighted in the series are Don Quixote and Hamlet.

The cozy bookstore, with sofas, Internet access and complementary mint tea, buys and sells “preloved books”. The advertising campaign was devised by the Italian Love Agency. The complete set of posters can be seen on I Believe in Advertising.

Via Buffet Complet.

Frankenstein Gets Relief

The Frankenstein Monster has been a reliable pitchman through the years, “scaring up” business for everything from candy and beer to shoe polish and condoms. In 2003, a very laid-back Monster pushed Osteo Bi-Flex, a pain relief supplement for arthritic, achy joints.

The TV ad featured a brief black and white lab scene in the traditional Universal style. The actor wearing the greenish makeup is David Combs.

With thanks to E. Francis Kohler

Related:
The Beer of Frankenstein
Frankenstein Sells Shinola

Frankenstein's Mixed-Up Mexican Lobby Cards

Here are two Mexican lobby cards, both from 1958, found on the always entertaining Monster Movie Music, a daily blog stop for me. Hosts Eegah! and Tabonga! — two names certainly deserving their exclamation marks — post music clips and screen caps, accompanied by brief and respectfully wacky commentary, to some of the best schlocky horror and discount science fiction movies ever committed to celluloid.

What’s interesting in these ads are the Karloff Frankenstein faces prominently displayed, even though the character as pictured doesn’t actually appear in these films.

Karloff does headline El castillo di Frankenstein, a dubbed version of Frankenstein 1970, but he plays the elderly scientist who builds an atomic Monster, seen in heavy bandages. The greenish Frankenstein face at left is a much younger Karloff in burn makeup from Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

The second card, from La hija di Frankenstein (Frankenstein’s Daughter) must have been even more baffling for moviegoers…

For starters, Boris Karloff had nothing to do with this one, but there he is, upper left, in his Son of Frankenstein (1939) getup. Then there’s the bizarre image of the movie’s Monster, also used on American posters, which is just as misleading. The bandaged head is somewhat similar — with added neck bolts — to that of the film’s creature, but the rest, from the neck down, is all wrong. The Monster in this movie is, in fact, the “daughter” of the title, seen wearing a rubber suit, and not the bare-chested muscle man depicted here. The ad writer only compounds the confusion with a line suggesting that the title character is the scientist: “Perverse and bloodthirsty, her cruelty surpasses that of her own father!”

Mind you, the filmmakers themselves were confused about this one. The script called for The Monster to be assembled from female body parts, but that seemingly important detail was not communicated to the makeup man who delivered tough-guy actor Harry Wilson to the set in a gruesome split-faced mask. The mistake was fixed on the spot, quick and dirty, with a padded bra and smeared lipstick.

Today’s movie posters certainly aren’t anywhere nearer to truth in advertising, but these lobby cards hail from a time when the ballyhoo was as bold as circus advertising and somehow — and perhaps only in retrospect —charming. The unapologetic use of the Karloff images attests to their power as a Frankenstein label, and unmistakable shorthand symbols for horror films.

Related:
Frankenstein’s Daughter Reviewed
Frankenstein 1970

The Posters of Frankenstein : Early Promotional Art, Frankenstein (1931)

Following up on my last post, here’s a good look at that early Lugosi/Frankenstein promotional illustration from 1931. Thanks — again! — to James Phillips for spotting this on eBay.

I’d only seen small reproductions of this one, and seeing it large really makes it pop. There’s a lush, painterly feel to it. You can see the brushstrokes. The bold rainbow-striped sky recedes from purple to yellow, creating depth. The Giant, struck by lightning, is cast in green light and sculpted with sharp, dark blue shadows. The artist, Kulz, would produce a number of classic, fully-painted posters for Universal. It was golden era when he, Grosz, Froelich and other top-notch illustrators had free reign, creating vastly original, highly individualistic works.

Size makes details emerge. Note the skyline and lit windows visible through the legs, the Giant rising like a ghostly apparition. The transparent effect is also used in the title, with the Giant’s head and background colors shining through.

The character in the Giant’s hand is clearly a scientist, dressing in a white lab coat, clutching a test tube. I zoomed in and rotated the image, revealing a textbook mad doctor with mustache, goatee and owl glasses. Knowing that Lugosi wanted to play the title character, not The Monster, could this have been his appearance? You could even say the character’s profile is Lugosi’s.

This ad is famous, of course, for announcing Bela Lugosi as the film’s lead. The success of Dracula in February ’31 kicked the actor’s career into high gear, with Universal promoting him as their new horror star. On April 1^st, Variety reported that the studio had “other parts in mind” for Lugosi, “one of them being Frankenstein, a medical melodrama”. Press releases also associated him with Murders in the Rue Morgue and a proposed remake of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Frankenstein was turned over to director Robert Florey who wrote a script with Garrett Fort and, in mid-June, directed the infamous, now lost screen test with Lugosi as The Monster. Lugosi balked at playing the mute, makeup-heavy character, but he was still attached to the project after James Whale replaced Florey. News of Lugosi being “switched” to Murders in the Rue Morgue surfaced in mid-July, but his replacement, Boris Karloff, was not named until late August when the film began shooting.

The Frankenstein ad appeared in The Big Book from Universal 1931-1932, a large, lavish exhibitor’s catalog with full-color art. Like Frankenstein, many of the films listed were in early pre-production with credits still tentative. Some of the films ballyhooed were never made. In years to follow, the Universal exhibitor catalogs would announce Boris Karloff as The Invisible Man, a part that eventually went to Claude Rains, or Karloff as the devil-like Cagliostro, a project that somehow transformed into The Mummy. Among the films that never came to be: Karloff was touted as Bluebeard, and Karloff with Lugosi in something called The Monster of Zombor.

The Kulz pre-production painting was eventually recycled as a theatrical poster for the Spanish-dubbed release of Frankenstein with minor corrections, namely giving the Giant a flatter head and requisite neck bolts.

Related:
Frankenstein Sticker
The Selling of Frankenstein, parts one, two, three, and four

Frankenstein Sticker

Here’s a real find. This small, two-color sticker surfaced recently at Hake’s Americana and Collectibles. The auction house description is here. It appears to be an early promotional item for James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.

The piece is undated, but the style, the hand-lettered logo, the catch phrase — The Man Who Made a Monster! — and the Laemmle credit are all typical of the original ad campaign.

The highly impressionistic image of The Monster, an amorphous golem-like giant with glowing red eyes, suggests pre-production art, something done prior to the now famous makeup having been finalized. It also evokes the earliest Frankenstein poster from a Universal campaign book that promoted Bela Lugosi as the star of the film. That one featured a giant man striding through a modern city, with beams shooting out of his eyes.

The origins of the sticker are unknown. It might be contemporary with the film or made at a later date. As to purpose, it could have been a theater giveaway. Handouts and premiums used to be quite common. My mom had a cutlery set she had assembled going to the movies. Forks this week, soup spoons next week. As a kid, I saw The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962) and got a lenticular ring showing Moe making faces. Saw Premature Burial (1962) and got a strip of black and white Monster Stamps, and I still have the May The Force Be With You lapel button they gave out on the first day Star Wars played, in 1977.

Whatever its origins or purpose, the Frankenstein sticker is a unique and very intriguing item.

Thanks go out to James Philips of Batfatty vs. The Chocodiles for the find, and thanks to Ted Newsom for expertise.

All Seats 35 Cents!

Seventy-seven years ago today, on December 4, in 1931, Frankenstein premiered in New York at the Mayfair Theater. Pictured above is the original newspaper ad that ran on this day in The New York Daily News. The Monster’s image is based on the alternate, unused makeup with curious, stapled folds in the forehead.

The Mayfair originally opened as the Columbia, a Burlesque house, in 1910. The famous theater architect Thomas W. Lamb gave it an Art Deco makeover in 1930, when it became the RKO Mayfair, showing movies. In its heyday, sitting at Broadway and 47th, the building often carried a giant billboard poster, several stories high, that wrapped all the way around the corner.

It was called the DeMille in the Sixties, playing super-large screen 70MM and Todd-A-O blockbusters, its last hurrah before being chopped up and repurposed as the Embassy, a multiplex.

Abandoned and boarded up since 1998, the theater was demolished in 2007. It was the last of the old Times Square movie palaces to go.

Related
Frankenstein Premieres
The Selling of Frankenstein

The Beer of Frankenstein

I bet you thought those neck protrusions were bolts for articulation or electrodes used to juice up The Monster. Now it can be told, they’re bottle openers!

This ad campaign proclaims Heineken Beer as the Official Sponsor of Halloween. Check out the
I Believe in Adv site to see posters of Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, a Zombie, and Death itself joining the Frankenstein Monster and enjoying a brew.

Prosit!

Related

The Pitch of Frankenstein

The Pitch of Frankenstein

There are few characters, real or fictional, as instantly recognizable and universally beloved as Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, two conditions that explain his popularity with advertisers. This recent ad, for Shinola Plus brand shoe polish, was created by the H2O Group of Guatemala, under Creative Director and Copywriter Julio Orozco Lanena,
with Art Direction by Nelson Hernández.

See the ad displayed here, along with companion versions using Universal’s Kharis and Lon Chaney’s vampire from London After Midnight.