Cult siren re - post : Betty of two worlds

With all the cult siren reposts of the last days I wanted to commemorate Betty Brosmer´s 81st birthday by putting her on the blog again as it has been 5 years since I first posted this. One of the most famous cult sirens she was once described as a mixture of Jessica Rabbit and Traci Lords.


Betty Brosmer will go down in pin up history for many reasons, the most notable of them being her very pronounced hourglass figure.


During her heyday in the 1950's, her measurements were somewhere around 38 - 18 - 36.


Brosmer was the epitome of the Californian girl, with that girl - next - door look not unlike Marilyn Monroe.


But whereas Monroe's and other glamour model's careers focused on the movies, Brosmer stayed with modeling, both commercial and pin up. Her classic beauty put Betty on over 300 magazine covers, everything from movie mags, gossip papers, pulp magazines, funny mags and books.


She was in thousands of magazine spreads. Her face appeared on full - page ads in Life, Time, Fortune, Look, Saturday Evening Post and other leading magazines of her day.


She won over 50 beauty contests before the age of 20.


Betty, the ultimate Calendar Girl, appeared on hundreds of calendars, she was on numerous music album covers, on billboards in Times Square and billboards across the country and on life - size cutouts in retail stores selling Kodak film, Thom McAn shoes and other products.


Every time you see a green tree hanging in an auto windshield, think of Betty. It was her effervescent smile on display cards that started that trend and made these tree air fresheners famous throughout the world. They are still sold today.


Betty was the first model to receive residuals every time her picture was published.


She was one of the first models to own the rights to many of her negatives and photos.


She was the highest paid model of that time period.


Betty was the first true Super Model and a personification of what the word " glamour " really means : beauty, allure, charm, elegance, magnetism, desirability and charisma.


These words have all been used in publications describing Betty, including awesome, engaging, captivating, irresistible, dazzling, radiant, exquisite, enchanting, stunning, fabulous and sensational.


It could not have been said any better than by Steve Sullivan, foremost author of several books specializing in the Great Glamour Girls of the 20th Century. In one of his books he wrote about Betty : "...there will never be another glamour girl like Betty Brosmer.


Her classically sunny, all - American blonde beauty was a worthy counterpart to that of Marilyn Monroe.


Her magnificently contoured - beyond - perfection figure was without equal.


Further, there was a glow, an incandescence about Betty that was not to be found in any other model.


And the total package was so utterly winning that Betty -- without every revealing much more epidermis than one would be likely to see at the beach -- was the definitive super model of the 1950's."


At one point in the 50's she she turned down Playboy because of her rule of never doing anything more than just chaste cheesecake shots.


In the 1960's, she stopped her pin up career when she married publisher of fitness magazines Joe Weider. Since then, she has been a regular model and writer for his publications and a role model for good health and fitness in later age.


What is kind of ironic is the fact that fitness guru Joe Weider prohibited female contestants for fitness competitions to do nude photoshoots while being married to a former pulp magazine model. Of course he changed his mind on this matter when he realized that it would help promote female bodybuilding and female fitness as something sexy and attractive.

There is really not much to find about Betty on wikipedia so here are the pages I used for research on this post where you can find more pictures :

betty brosmer number 1 on the ultimate hourglass figure list

betty brosmer on javas bachelor pad

betty brosmer fansite english / german / spanish

tribute to betty brosmer / betty weider homepage

In the original post I included a video of Betty but because I´m going to need all the videos for Today´s other birthdays here is an animated GIF.

This could have been a totally different post since Kevin Smith celebrates his 46th birthday who has not only made such geek favorite movies as Clerks ( I still haven´t seen the second part ) or Chasing Amy but written a few celebrated runs in comics like Daredevil with art by Joe Quesada.

He also wrote the Spider - Man / Black Cat : The Evil That Men Do mini series which took a few years between issues and tried to use the break to change the trajectory of the story by shoehorning a retconned rape of the Black Cat into it since that was the in thing after Brad Meltzer´s Identity Crisis ( about which I wrote at length in my COMICBABE BATTLE post about the Black Cat´s history ). The whole thing was just a bad story with good Terry Dodson art which resulted in Mark Millar getting the third Spider - Man title who has absolutely no clue how to write Marvel heroes and thanks to the constant Marvel NOW rebooting I have no idea what the Black Cat does now, the last thing I heard was that she was a lesbian.



Butch Patrick turns 63 best known for his role of Eddie Munster. I have bought the complete Munsters DVD set when it was offered at one of amazons bargain sales but so far I haven´t had time to watch it since I still haven´t finished with the second season of The Adams Family.



Madeline Smith is probably best known as the beautiful young italian agent sleeping with James Bond in the opening of Live and Let Die whose blue dress zipper meets its match in Bond's magnetic watch. She turns 67.

She also starred in such horror movies like Taste The Blood Of Dracula, Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell, Theater Of Blood and The Vampire Lovers, one of the movies I´m going to cover if I can ever continue my series of Hammer movie posts. Speaking of Theater Of Blood I almost posted this movie with Vincent Price before on Diana Rigg´s 78th birthday last month since she also plays a part in it.



We´re back to tv shows from my youth with Max Wright who celebrates his 73rd birthday best known as William Tanner on the cult tv show Alf.

There also was a comic series by Marvel but I can´t say much about it since the only issue I ever bought was a parody of the Uncanny X - Men.

Now Alf was a big phenomenon in the 80s but I want to talk about the show where I had seen Max Wright before which was called Misfits of Science . Some of my older readers might remember this series fondly.

Now Max Wright was not in the pilot, he appeared in the tv series which was short lived as super heroes were not en vogue as Today. The show about this group of misfits with super power was one of the first gigs of Courtney Cox and even Leslie Easterbrook, best known from the Police Academy movies appears in one episode. If you want to know more about Misfits of Science read Tim Rose´s post on FRIDAY @ 8/7 CENTRAL .



We really have a horror theme going on in Today´s post appendix as our next birthday is mexican actress Maria Duval who turns 79 and who has starred in such movies like The Living Coffin, Santo Versus The Vampire Women and Santo Versus El Estrangulador. Apropos horror movies and Courtney Cox, Today is also the birthday of the late Wes Craven director of the A Nightmare On Elm Street and Scream series. I have to admit I still haven´t seen the fourth one. There is a fourth Scream movie, right ? 

Also no longer with us is Peter O´Toole and I hope I haven´t posted this.



It´s favorite tv shows the fourth with Manfred Sexauer who must have been the coolest name on german tv. Well, apart from the maker of the show, Mike Leckebusch. Back to Manfred Sexauer with such a porn name he could only be the presenter of Musikladen one of the best german music shows. But not only did they present the best music acts, as Amber Frost puts it so eloquently in her post Ode to Der Musikladen´s Teutonic Gogo - Girls, The Worst Disco Dancers The World Has Ever Seen on DANGEROUS MINDS the main appeal were the gogo girls who were not selected for their dancing skills but rather their looks. They were the most popular feature of the show especially in the special episodes that were broadcast after midnight where they got to dance topless. There was one dance in particular who also was in a lot of men´s magazines but I never found out her real name and another gogo dancer also appeared on TUTTI FRUTTI . Now you probably expected to find a video here but since I could not find any video from the topless shows what´s the point ?

Last but not least is Myrna Loy best known for her role of Nora Charles. Since we just had the birthday of her on screen partner William Powell in our FLASH FRIDAY post from last week there is also no video for her.

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