Back in time: Nestlé tells a story

First Nestlé logo

On January 15, I did a small post on how GE turned to comic-books in 1950s to rekindle interest in science and technology among students in America. Over the last hundred years, multinational companies have used comics as a potent tool to showcase and sell a multitude of products and merchandise on one hand and educate the community on the other. In fact, early logos and adverts of companies bore a close resemblance to illustrations in children's storybooks. Others looked like picture postcards and movie posters.

The Nestlé Company was established in 1866 by Henri Nestlé, a trained pharmacist, to "help combat the problem of infant mortality due to malnutrition." Nestlé — which means 'little nest' in German — understood the power of branding. When one of his agents suggested that the nest could be exchanged for the white cross of the Swiss flag, Nestlé's response was firm: "I regret that I cannot allow you to change my nest for a Swiss cross... I cannot have a different trademark in every country; anyone can make use of a cross, but no one else may use my coat of arms."

The 'little nest' hasn't changed in nearly 150 years. You can read more about it at Nestlé.

Source: www.sparehed.com

FILM REVIEW

Peter Benchley's Jaws and The Deep

 
“Smile, you son of a BITCH!”

In case you forgot who said those words, it was Amity Island police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) after he shoots at a scuba tank and blows up Jaws.

I saw Jaws a few years after it was released in 1975 but I didn't know it was directed by Steven Spielberg. In fact, I didn't even know who Spielberg was back then. I saw the movie on a cousin's VCR and it was only much later I realised that you don't watch a film like Jaws on video. You need Jaws to come after you on 70 mm, quietly and stealthily, and drag you under. I had taken the bite right out of the flesh-eating monster's mouth.

So then, I came to know of Spielberg only after E.T. (1982) and by then I'd also seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). This was a period when I used to watch lots of films without bothering to find out who the directors were. I was barely getting acquainted with the actors.

I'm not going to review Jaws the film, which, thirty-seven years later, continues to hold its own, as a cult film and the biggest grosser before Star Wars (1977) came along. For me, Jaws is not about an ugly great white shark attacking unsuspecting beach-goers in the resort town of Amity Island. It's the scary music by John Williams that presages the coming of the killer fish. You know something horrible is going to happen to people who know absolutely nothing about it, and there's no way you can warn them off. Mute the volume and Jaws is like a toy fish in a bathtub. Spielberg and Williams knew how to jangle our nerves.

Apart from the music, the other highlight of the film is the sombre performance by Roy Scheider who wages a lone battle against Jaws, the seafaring shark, and Mayor Lawrence ‘Larry’ Vaughan (Murray Hamilton), the land shark. Vaughan refuses to close down the beach so the town council can reap profits during the holiday season. It's left to the police chief to hunt down Jaws with the help of oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw).

The film has its tense moments, like the time when Hooper goes underwater in a cage which is destroyed by the shark or when the half-crazed Quint, a former shark survivor, stops Brody from calling the coast guard for help or when the shark hunter slides down the deck of the half-submerged boat and straight into the open jaws of the great white. In the end, the brave police chief blows the monster out of the water.

Jaws was based on a novel by American writer Peter Benchley who wrote two other thrillers set in and around the high seas and which were made into films—The Deep (1977) and The Island (1980). I read all three books a very long time ago though I've only seen Jaws and The Deep.

 
The Deep, directed by Peter Yates, is a suspense film that did well at the box office but wasn't quite as successful as Jaws. Unlike the latter, I can recollect almost nothing about this film, except that it has a lot of underwater scenes. I also remember being scared out of my skin when Gail Berke (Jacqueline Bisset) screams when she suddenly spots a hideous face in the window in the dead of night.

To refresh my memory, I read about The Deep on the internet: it's an action-packed adventure film about a young vacationing couple, Gail Berke and David Sanders (Nick Nolte), who discover artifacts, including a mysterious ampule of amber-coloured liquid and a medallion, while scuba diving near shipwrecks off the shark-infested coast of Bermuda. That little discovery sets them on a dangerous course against evil treasure hunters who'll stop at nothing to get the ampule.

A few observations to round up: Jaws and The Deep are shot on high seas or under water; Robert Shaw and man-eating sharks are in both the films; Peter Benchley and Roy Scheider died in 2006 and 2008; Eli Wallach acts as Adam Coffin, the only survivor of a sunken ship, in The Deep; and if I didn't know Steven Spielberg in Jaws, I didn't know Nick Nolte in The Deep either. I met him five years later in 48 Hrs.

This post is offered as part of Tuesday's Overlooked/Forgotten Films over at Todd Mason's blog at http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com

Copyright for film posters: Universal Pictures for Jaws and Columbia Pictures for The Deep

WISDOM FROM BOOKS & COMICS

Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence

© Appleton, NY

Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

I shan't be lonely now. I WAS lonely; I WAS afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

...he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.

What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring — that's all.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country... Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?


You'll find earlier literary wisdom here:

Jean-Paul Sartre

Daniel Defoe

Thomas Hardy

When GE turned to comic-books

While, globally, corporate social responsibility came to be implemented by multinational corporations since the 1960s, US giant General Electric used a unique form of CSR long before it officially became a part of corporate culture: GE published comics to get students interested in science in a fun and colourful way. Here's what GE has to say:

It’s become a vexing cliché to bemoan the lack of student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). “A national crisis has been identified in the area of global technological competitiveness,” warned a recent study by Purdue University. “Will our science and high technology sectors have the talented STEM graduates prepared to compete and be leaders in tomorrow’s world?

In response to this STEM crisis, the White House has launched the Educate to Innovate campaign. There is also the National STEM Video Game Challenge, where kids learn STEM skills by designing games. GE has some experience experimenting with play and fun in an effort to attract young minds to science and engineering. 

In the 1950s, comic books were as popular with kids as video games are today, and just as decried by parents. “Teachers, parents and lawmakers were bitter about newsstand comics in 1945,” General Electric Review wrote in September 1953. “But in the public relations field, although were all aware of the adult fear that comic books were producing a crop of juvenile delinquents, we couldn’t escape the conclusion that the medium had attractive possibilities for mass communications.

 
Intrigued by the possibilities, GE started printing comics “on mammoth presses on newsprint stock in quantities of 500,000 to 3,000,000.” The titles: Adventures In Jet Power, Adventures Inside the Atom, and Land of Plenty, A Story of Freedom and Power.

 
According to GE Review, the “drawings were shown to several vice presidents and managers” before publication. “And the results of these previews were indeed stimulating because the eight members of management who saw the colourful boards had so much fun looking, reading, and commenting that they not only gave their final approval to the project, but also suggested many themes for future series.”


Photos: www.gereports.com

Death of a Ghost Town

Death of a Ghost Town—No.60W of Sundance Western: Illustrated World Library Series published by World Distributors (Manchester) Ltd, UK—is the story of an abandoned town called Richville in California. Set in 1880 at the time of the gold rush, the town, a typical cluster of wooden structures, is deserted except for a lone bandit and gold digger called Welton who is desperately searching for old Orson’s gold stashed in one of the houses.

About half-a-day’s journey from Richville, a stagecoach is making its way to an unknown destination when three masked men on horseback ambush it and kidnap one of the occupants, a young boy. The gun toting men bring the boy to Richville, which they’d heard of before, and lock him up in one of the houses and leave on an errand.

It’s clear at the outset that the gangsters have mistaken the young lad for a rich man’s son and kidnapped him with the intention of claiming ransom from his father. Now the boy’s father, a poor man, works for the rich man whose son they were actually supposed to abduct. But the hoodlums don’t know this.

The gold digger, who is no paragon of virtue, watches quietly from a distance. He knows what the men are up to and, in their brief absence, hatches a plot to whisk the boy away and claim the ransom for himself. “This is another way of making a bit of cash without working hard for it,” he thinks to himself.

The bandit rescues the boy who instantly realises that he is in the clutches of just another rotten scoundrel, but there’s no escape. The bearded man tells the boy, “I’m not one of the same breed as those three rogues. I said right away when I saw you in their hands: ‘I will help him. This poor kid’.” The young lad is far from reassured.

Even as the two set out toward the bandit’s horse, the gangsters return, forcing the two to hide in one of the other houses. Not aware of the gold digger’s presence, the men think that the boy has escaped and is hiding somewhere nearby. The men call out to the boy and when he fails to appear, one of them, who looks to be the gang leader, begins to set the houses on fire — “The one way to make him come out quick. You’ll see!”

His two accomplices are not convinced this ploy will work and as they argue, an interesting story is unfolding inside, where the boy tells his so-called benefactor that if they ever leave the place alive his father would surely reward him. “But my father is poor!” he says, to Welton’s disbelief. “What did you say?”

As the gangsters continue to squabble outside, the boy realises why he has been kidnapped. “Ah! Now I’ve got it. They thought they were kidnapping the boss’s son who should have made the trip. They mistook me to be the boss’s son!”

By now the house in which they are hiding is also torched and as the flames begin to lick at the dilapidated wooden structure, Welton orders the boy out so that he can escape by the back door. But the boy refuses to leave the bandit to whom he says, “They would kill you if they saw that you tried to save me. I’ll stay with you. Let’s try and find a way for both of us to escape.”

Welton is stunned and even as he tries to make sense out of the boy’s words, the ceiling collapses, but he is pulled to safety by the young lad. What happens next is equally bewildering for the bandit who discovers the hidden gold under the debris.

Outside, the gangsters are caught in a gunfight and eventually part ways and leave town.

As the fire spreads rapidly and destroys all the houses in the ghost town, Richville, for the first time, sees “a gesture of generosity and affection” which isn’t lost on Welton who takes the boy home.


Photo: Scanned cover of my copy of the western comic-book.

You can read my review of two short stories by Anton Chekhov at http://chesscomicsandcrosswords.blogspot.com/2012/01/short-stories-anton-chekhov-lottery.html

Asterix and the potion of magic

Nothing's fair in love and war or, for that matter, in comics. Now I have been reading Asterix, my favourite comic-book, for more than three decades. Yet, during all these years, I have never given much thought to the obvious flaws in the Goscinny-Uderzo creation. And there are quite a few.

For instance, in Asterix in Britain, the brave Gaulish warrior and his pigtailed friend Obelix cross over into Roman-occupied Britain with a barrel of magic potion to help a small village fight against the might of Caesar's Rome. Now this village has been successfully defending itself against the Romans without the aid of the potion. All that the Britons, as indomitable as the Gauls, drink is hot water, with a drop of milk, till Asterix introduces them to tea with some herbs that Druid Getafix gave him before he left home.

Now hot water with a spot of milk is no match for the druid’s powerful concoction and yet that is all the magic the Britons have to stave off the invading Romans. My point is if one little village of Britons can defeat the Romans without any magic potion, why can’t the village of Gauls, as we know it, do likewise?

On the rare occasion when the Gauls are without their magic potion, they turn to Obelix to guard the village because he fell into the cauldron of magic potion when he was a baby and it had a permanent effect on him. No one among the Britons fell into a cauldron of hot water and even if someone did, the poor man would have been scalded for life. 

Asterix comics are replete with examples of brave and ordinary people who fight the Romans with little other than the clothes on their back. For example, the Corsicans in Asterix in Corsica stare down their Roman opponents while the Helvetians in Asterix in Switzerland scare the hell out of the tin-hat soldiers by blowing into their alpine horns. No magic potion in both cases. It goes to the credit of the Gauls that they are willing to share the potion with anyone who’s up against the Romans. 

See what I mean. If it weren’t for the magic potion, there would be no village of indomitable Gauls and no bashing of Romans and no menhir-delivery man either. Then again, Asterix wouldn’t have been half as funny without the magic potion.

Copyright for images: Hodder Dargaud

Memorable musical movies

One of the things I like about blogging is that you can blog about anything you like, and that includes both exciting and mundane stuff. You can post a serious article or a light piece depending on what suits you best. Over the past two years this blog has veered towards the latter mainly because I have the patience but not the time to write thought-provoking and debate-inducing stories. Of course, I could post a well-researched piece every few days rather than write nonsense every single day (Asterix and Obelix agree with me – look at them go!) But then, I like to post something daily, even if it’s hackneyed stuff, because it keeps the momentum going (I don’t know where) and because, hopefully, it will attract more traffic (I don’t see how).

That’s enough baiting and fishing for the day (or night in my case). I’ll leave you with more of the banal (in terms of post treatment) — this time a film reel of some of the most memorable musical films ever. I’ve seen them all, in no particular order. Like I said I don’t have the time to write about each of them separately unless I do one or two a week. Now if only I’d the patience…