Felling like a bloated, overblown spy adventure in space today.

Moonraker Bubblegum cards from Topps, 1979.  I talked about the stickers here.

So in 1983 the various companies making toothpaste decided to bring their product competition to comic book pages in the form of some dramatic stories aimed at kids.  Brushing your teeth was no longer a chore, it was WAR, and Crest and Aim were enlisting kid’s help in defeating cavities all over the country.  On Tuesday I shared a couple Crest comic ads that were a bit weird, but overall kind of boring.  Today I'm going to focus on a much cooler ad campaign from the makers of Aim, that features one of the coolest advertising gimmicks I've ever seen…

Before I jump into the gimmick, I thought I'd start with the above, which was the basic full page ad that ran in magazines during 1983.  It has an awesome concept with the sword/toothbrush battle that's unfortunately marred by the weird addition of a tube of toothpaste obscuring our view of the full action.  That aside, I love the design on the villain character, the Evil Tooth Invader.  He's a cross between a swashbuckling space pirate and the Marvel comics villain Ultron.  I honestly think I would have cared about brushing my teeth more as a kid had I thought this guy was running around causing all sorts of shenanigans in my mouth.

Anyway, the ad agency that got the Aim account was totally on their game when they decided to come up with campaign based around offering a full on, eight-page removable storybook in magazines back in 1983.  Not only was it hard to pass up while flipping through an issue of Muppet Magazine, it was filled to the brim with Jack Kirby-esque artwork that was totally leaping off the page…

The story is set in the galaxy of your mouth, near the Constellation of Teeth, on the planet Molar.  We join Jeff Smilemaker and his companions, the lovely Fluoride and their robot friend Floss, right after being defeated in a battle with the evil Tooth Invader and his Plaque Troops on the planet Bicuspid.  While resting on Molar and attending to their wounds, the three happen upon a strange crystalline creature named Sugar who they hope will help them in their battle against tooth decay.  But the three are soon besieged again by the Tooth Invader and his horde of Plaque Troops. Will sugar help them?  Will they win out against impossible odds?

Honestly, this story, though derivate of Star Wars and a million other action stories, is so damn cool I don't even care that it's an advertisement!

If all advertising was done with this level of awesome, I think I would probably have been inspired into the ad game as a career choice.  Seriously, I want another chapter in the continuing adventure of Jeff Smilemaker and the gang.  I'm curious about the time they got stuck in the pit of Gingivitis and had to fight the tribe of abscessed tooth monsters!

Seriously, I wonder if there were any other Aim storybooks created during the early 80s?

I recently picked up a big run of Muppet Magazine and while flipping through the issues I was astounded by the number of awesome advertisements.  I figured I'd share some of them here and there, and this week I thought it would be fun to take a look at some toothpaste ads.

First up we have a couple of Crest ads from 1983 and 1984 respectively.  Though using the comic layout was nothing new for companies in the 80s (just take a gander at the huge Hostess comic ads archive here at Branded), I do think there was an upswing in the trend.  Unfortunately, even though it was kind of cool for Crest to develop the idea of a crack team of cavity fighting heroes, the end result was kind of weird and boring…

Whereas the Hostess comic ads were wonderfully wacky and over the top, these two Crest ads are totally weak.  From the context clues in the two comics, I'm guessing the Crest team's home territory of Toothopolis is actually located in one of two places, either in little Chucky's own mouth, or the shared space of every mouth in the known universe which coexist on a metaphysical plane (which is in turn called Toothopolis.)  Either way it's confusing and little Chucky has been teleported into his own mouth.  Okay, I take back my initial statement, these comics are absolutely bat-shit crazy.

I love the imagery of turning a tube of toothpaste into a gun, and I'm actually surprised one of the companies didn't think to try this out in their actual packaging.   I guess some kid would want to put the toothpaste directly on their teeth and the imagery of a kid with a gun to his mouth would be kind of wrong.  Still, it exists in the comics, so we can always get our dose of unfortunate design that way.  Also, though I realize that the writer was restricted to a single page of comic storytelling, I think it's a waste to introduce an entire team of Crest heroes just to have the leader order the rest to lounge around while he single handedly goes out to fight the cavity creeps.  Kind of full of himself.  At least he lets the kid help out in the second comic...

To cap off the E.T. theme this week, here’s a better look at the wax wrapper from that Buster Browns shoe ad I shared on Tuesday.

E.T Topps bubblegum cards, circa 1982.

I think I've written about this before, but there's aspect to American pop culture that I find endlessly fascinating; this deep need for sustainable continuity.   Though we're fanatics for origin stories, once an idea is set into motion we very rarely want to see it end.  So when a successful sitcom invades our television schedule, the hope is that it will be continually produced for as along as possible, ten, twenty years down the line. When it ends, there's still hope in our hearts for spin-offs, and reunion specials, and when all else fails, hopefully it will eventually end up as a big screen adaptation (which will hopefully be successful enough to garner a trilogy.)

I'm not sure what it is in our culture that makes us so clingy as an audience.  Maybe subconsciously the idea of a story having a distinct ending echoes fears of our own eventual mortality.  Maybe we just love a good success story and nothing says success like sequels and long running TV which have a validating effect on our own enjoyment.  I loved Ghostbusters something fierce growing up and I pined for the eventual sequel that seemed to take a million years to materialize.  Sure, I'd watch the original when ever it came on TV, but somewhere in the back of my mind I felt that I deserved to see the continuing story.

Battling against this cultural yearning are the hopes and dreams of the very people who makes these stories possible.  Sure, Dan Akaroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Sigorny Weaver seemed more than willing to make a sequel but how did Bill Murray and Rick Moranis feel?  Word is that they weren't all that keen on the idea, that as actors and creative-minded individuals they were more interested in pursuing something new, something that was interesting to them at the time.  Often this creative reluctance to suit up for a sequel is what quashes projects, but it's not necessarily the end of the story.  There are other outlets for continuity, especially for entertainment that feeds the all-ages sensibility of an audience.  The cartoon spin-off for instance.  While waiting the five years in-between Ghostbusters films, DiC started production on the Real Ghostbusters cartoon, which featured the continuing adventures of our favorite spectral sleuths.  But for various reasons the creative yearnings of writers, and the monetary needs of the studio forced the story to change.  Egon became blonde, the group all began wearing colored coded jumpsuits, Janine became a punk, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man became an ally and Slimer switched from being a chaotic-neutral villain to a bungling, Baby Huey-esque sidekick.

This leads me to the gist of today's subject, which is the continuing story of the beloved plant-friendly alien, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial in his only sequel story, The Book of the Green Planet.  Published in 1985 and written by William Kotzwinkle, the same gentleman responsible for the film-to-book novelization of the original story, Book of the Green Planet follows E.T.'s adventures after reuniting with his species as they travel back to the home planet to study the flora specimens they've been collecting from Earth over the millennia.  In the original novelization we got a peek into a different view of the movie as Kotzwinkle tended to write from E.T.'s perspective, giving the reader an insight absent from the movie.  In that book E.T. comes across as a wholly different character, at times a centered peaceful monk-like being wise beyond his ten million years of age (yup in the book he's 10,000,000 years old for crying out loud), a others a tired curmudgeon afraid of offending Elliott and his siblings as he sees them as the rulers of the planet.  It's an odd balancing act that takes a weird shift in the follow-up sequel novel.

Unburdened by adhering to a script, Kotzwinkle decides to let loose in the sequel revealing that E.T. is not merely an alien from another world, but a traveler from outside of our universe/dimension.  Kotzwinkle also decided to mold the character more into the image we get in the film, drawing him as playfully ignorant, continuously spouting incorrect English to his friends as if he had learned to master the language during his layover on Earth.  He's also shown depressed, having left his newfound friends behind, never to see them again, yet I find this awkward and weird considering that he's literally lived throughout the millennia.  Was this experience with Elliott so profound, and if so, how boring was the rest of his existence?  Besides, for a being of that age who travels through out dimensions and across galaxies with ease, isn't it a bit naive to assume you'd never see your friends again?

Anyway, the basic plot involves E.T. returning home only to be demoted for his shenanigans on Earth.  Sad and lonely, it becomes his quest to find a way to travel back to the Milky Way and to his beloved friend Elliott.  The book flits back and forth between E.T.'s adventures trying to secure a vessel to make the trip and a slightly older Elliott on Earth who is struggling with puberty and his newfound obsession with girls (which troubles E.T., through their psychic connection, to no end.)   Trying to help (but coming across as a dumped ex stalker) E.T. sends astral projections of himself towards Earth in the hopes that they will meld with Elliott's troubled soul and help him to find peace (as well as the nerve to finally step up and mingle with the girl of his dreams.)  In a sort of anticlimactic ending E.T. grows a ship (making it easier to hide from his people) and embarks on the long journey back to Elliott, though the story ends before the trip is finished leaving the book open to an obvious sequel (though unlike this one, a sequel that never materialized.)

All in all, this book (and the original novelization) gives the audience what it craves, a continuation of the story with so much more to explore.  It's weird and not much like the original film, but it is something which in and of itself is sort of a treasure.  Also, believe it or not, with the re-release of this book in 2002 there was a teacher's guide printed that has artistic rendering of a couple of the odder creatures mentioned in the book including the ellusive flopgopple!

As part of the impromptu E.T. week here at Branded in the 80s, I wanted to point you all at an article I wrote for the ever awesome Monkey Goggles!  Basically I spent some time talking about the benefits and pitfalls of movie novelizations as well as digging a little deeper into the E.T. tie-in written by William Kotzwinkle.  Did you know that E.T. is ten million years old?  Or that Elliott's mom is pretty damn lonley, yearning for a man and some romance?  Well you would if you'd read the book!  So go on over to Monkey Goggles and check it out…

T.L. over at Flashlights are Something to Eat has been posting a bunch of vintage E.T. goodness that I've had a lot of fun reading, so I thought I'd take a second and riff off that today.  Watching E.T. in the theater was one of those seminal movie-going experiences I had as a kid, one where I was at that perfect age where there was no need to suspend my disbelief.  Santa Claus was still real, and so was that fugly little Reese’s-Pieces-eating alien.  What I think is strange is that even though I loved that flick, and despite the fact that it was a huge mega hit which was merchandised to hell and back (E.T. even a spokesman for Coors), I never really had much E.T. swag.  I know I had a plush E.T. doll (not the cool faux-leather one, but the regular fuzzy edition), and I eventually got a copy of the Atari game with an old used 2600 console that I snagged at a garage sale, but that's about it.  I bet my mom never thought to pick any of the toys up because she figured it was too tame for my tastes, not as action packed as say He-Man or Star Wars figures.  Even so I always sort of coveted my friend's E.T. stuff though, from board games to read-along books, it all just seemed to damn cool.

Well after flipping though a bunch of older magazines lately I've come across a couple of odd bits of E.T. merchandising that I thought would be fun to share.  This first ad is for a series of E.T. branded Buster Brown kids shoes…

I'm betting this line of shoes catered more towards little girls as two of the three styles shown are distinctly feminine.  Actually, I'm kind of disappointed in the boy's pair as they're kind of bland.   Sure, there's the neat iconic silhouette of Elliot and E.T. riding a bike in front of the moon, but for all intents and purposes these are just plain brown leather shoes.  They're not even sneakers, which is more in line with what a boy would want to wear, so these were probably regulated to family parties and church.  The girl's designs, on the other hand, are pretty neat though.  The one pair has the sweet E.T. heart pattern on the bottom tread, and the other has that neat plastic decal that really shows off one's love for the little alien.

I also think it's interesting that Buster Brown decided to use packs of the Topps bubblegum cards as a sales incentive for picking up a pair of these shoes.  I mean bubblegum cards were still about a quarter a pack around 1980-1986 or so.  I'm sure the shoes were still like $20 a pair back then, so it's not like the parents were getting a deal.

**Update**  Thanks to Craig for commenting and posting a link to the E.T. Buster Brown shows commercial.  There were at least sneakers for boys...

The second ad was for a Kuwahara BMX bike.  Billed as the bike Elliot rides in the flick, Kuwahara sure wasn't working very hard to sell this fact with any sort of movie specific branding.  Not only was it sans basket (to make it a little more movie accurate), there weren't even any E.T. decals or logos.  In fact, unless you popped for an additional $3.50 for the poster, how would you ever know?  Actually, that poster seems a little weird, I mean what kid wanted a poster of just a bike sitting in some fog?  Actually, now that I think about it I would probably kill for a poster of my old GT Performer just sitting in a bank of fog, so scratch that…