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Monday, August 24, 2015

Godfrey Comes to the Bay!


One deal I have on the burner is something with Arthur Godfrey-- it seems there's an entire broadcast day from 1939 at the venerable Internet Archive, including the morning show hosted by a somewhat inebriated-sounding him.  If I could just get that to work with Paula doing her last show on the BBC...this might end up being the art for that one.

Anyway, this thing here.  Arthur Godfrey was a radio guy-- announcer, host, emcee-- starting in the 1920s.  By the 50's, when TV came along, he was its biggest celebrity, with 3 TV programs on the air at the same time in 1953.

So when the network needed to plug him, like personal appearances, or if his show was starting in a new city, you'd see ads like this-- cheesy, grainy black & white giant-head ads (the Giant Head ad format was popular then, this head actually came off an ad for radio tubes.  You'd be flipping through the Saturday Evening Post and run into something that could be cut out and turned into a Halloween mask)-- Proclaiming GODFREY COMES TO THE BAY!  or THE TRI-CITIES! or whatever.

Which is a long way of saying, hey look, I imitated cutup advertising art from the 50s!

Why giant heads?  Who knows?