The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

The Gods Must Be Crazy was an independent cinema mainstay upon its release, but I rarely hear it spoken of these days.

"Workin' for the Yankee dollar"

The Barberettes' version of a song written in the 1940s by Lionel Belasco and Lord Invader.

The "Hilltop Ad"

In yesterday's post I linked Coca Cola to an ad the company ran in July, 1971. Known as the "Hilltop Ad", it features a crowd of teenagers, dressed in clothes that signify where in the world they are from, gathered atop a hill in Italy and lip-synching to a song co-written by the advertising company Coca Cola had hired to accelerate sales of its brown drink. This one-minute song proved so popular amongst Americans that radio stations were besieged with requests to "play the ad."

I remember seeing the "Hilltop Ad" as a nine-year-old. And though I too was drawn to it, I could never understand why, when the camera pulls back to show those gathered, they are not in the shape of the world, only a third of it. Years later my mother, who used to sing this ad to us on car rides, told me that it was not the incomplete world-shape people talked about back then, but that it looked like the place from which babies are born.

"It's the real thing/ (Coke is)/ What the world wants today"

A picture by Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog is now available as a postage stamp. The picture, entitled Bogner's Grocery (1960),  features no less than a dozen signs for Coca Cola products outside a long-gone corner store at 158 West 5th Avenue. A secondary narrative is a meeting of four boys under the age of ten.

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A Los Angeles Education

"It was the week after I tore up the linoleum."

Black Light Posters

None of the posters in the above collection were among those I stared at in the 1970s.