That´s right, I´m talking about the Hostess Twinkies ads that appeared in all of the Bronze Age comicbooks I read as a kid. You know how you find stuff while you are looking for something else ? As faithful followers of the blog know this happens to me on a frequent basis and it is indeed how a lot of my posts come about. In this case these ads are something I put into a special folder together with other ads and oddities I find that way.
I always thought that I would use them to spice up my posts - you know, put in one of those Spider - Man Twinkies ads in a Spider - Man post and such - but since I am woefully behind on my posts I don´t always have the time to go over them once more and see if I can cram then into a post.
Lately there has been a resurgence of these ads - partially because there was the news that they were going out of business - and I have to say I found the most ads these last few days. A lot of it has to do with nostalgia and I have to say it also is a great part of the appeal for me. When they appeared in the comics I read as a teenager - since I only got american comicbooks through an uncle - I didn´t think much of them as they were always there. What´s more, since we didn´t have Twinkies in Germany they always remained this abstract thing. In Spain there were some similar baked products but I still never found out if they really tasted that good.
So what is the lasting appeal of these ads ? As I said, part of it is nostalgia.
Another part is that they always use the same formula : there is a villain who is ultra cheesy right down to the awful name but who still manages to get the upper hand on the hero whose last resort is whipping out a pair of delicious Twinkies. And I always wondered where they kept those pies.
Something I only learned to appreciate in my later years is the art as those ads were drawn by some of the big names in the comicbook industry : Neal Adams, John Romita, Curt Swan, Sal Buscema, Gil Kane, Ross Andru, Ernie Colon, George Tuska, Joe Sinnott, Dick Giordano etc since they probably meant a hefty paycheck even if it was not high entertainment.
But those were other times and comicbook artists were not thinking so much about their legacy and more about where their next meal was coming from. And Marvel Comics was not the only comicbook company who made those Hostess Twinkie ads. There was DC Comics, Harvey Comics really with a lot Richie Rich, Hot Stuff, Casper, Wendy and Sad Sack ( a comic I never heard about ) ads as well as Gold Key with Bugs Bunny, Tweety and Sylvester, Wylie Coyote and the Roadrunner and Daffy Duck.
Now if you have been here before you know that I like to group things so in this post we have only Marvel stuff. There will be other posts for DC Comics, Harvey Comics, Gold Key Comics and probably some other stuff like independent comicbook companies and Hostess Twinkie ad homages.
Even splitting it up into these companies there are more Hostess Twinkie fruit pie ads than I can cram into a post. So I have tried not to put too many ads with the same super hero into this. I mean you can probably do an entire post alone with the Spider - Man ads ( and maybe I will do that ) but I don´t want these posts to become too boring. I also found some original art but I don´t want to put them all into one post so in this one we have two from THOR and there will be other pages in following posts.
As always this is a totally subjective selection that is based on personal preference and those ads I still remember. But I will include some links where you can find all the Hostess Twinkie ads you want. By the way, does anybody know if there is a book that collects all these ads ? Assembling them all would probably be difficult - as well as getting the right from all the different comicbook companies - but I would surely buy such a book.
As always I have to give credit where credit is due because without the following guys I quite literally couldn´t have done this post and when you are looking for Hostess Twinkie ads there are two main resources : the first is MIKE`S AMAZING WORLD OF COMICS . Besides a lot of other stuff like public service ads and ads for Saturday morning cartoons they have the best scans of the Hostess Twinkies ads and the only downside is that it´s sorted by publication date, not by comicbook company or character.
If you want them sorted by character you can find that on SEAN BABY but the scans are of much lower quality. I also found some Hostess ads on THE BRONZE AGE OF BLOGS , THE VINTAGE TOY ADVERTISER , BRANDED IN THE 80s and 13TH DIMENSION even has two posts, one for Marvel Comics and one for DC Comics ( which will be the topic of our next Hostess Twinkies ads post ). Of course there have been many spoofs of these ads over the years and BOOKSTEVE`S LIBRARY has two posts on the Hostess parody ads from First Comics, which will be the topic of a future post on TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN. Which may or may not include some material from the master collection of The Line Is Drawn over at COMIC BOOK RESOURCES .
Longtime readers may remember that I used to link to them more often when I wrote about comicbook news on a regular basis. My, how times have changed. Today all the news about comicbooks are so depressing or ridiculous ( or in the case of Disney´s new NEW WARRIORS series both ) that I haven´t been on this site - or any comicbook news site for years.
Before we come to Today´s eclectic list of awesome anniversaries there is a celebrity birthday I missed which I have to include in this post. The reason why I missed it is that before Yesterday I had no idea who Dian Parkinson was or that she provided the breast two reasons why most male viewers watched The Price Is Right between 1975 and 1993 religiously.
And the reason why I didn´t know her is that like the Hostess Twinkie fruit pies The Price Is Right is something I never experienced - like a lot of other game shows with ultimate sexbombs and my only chance to discover them is purely by accident and through the wonders of the internet.
Now the reason why I am including her in this post Today is that her 75th birthday was on November the 30th and while I don´t want to go back to that date and change one of my old posts to include her I also don´t want to wait until November. Especially with the way things are going now with the Corona virus and a lot of other things. So I am writing a little cult siren entry for her now and if I don´t make it till November at least I have that off my plate. And if I really DO make it to November - and don´t forget her birthday which is also a possibility - I can do a little of the old copy / paste flim - flam, maybe shorten the text and add some things here and there.
And it´s not like I can say that much about Dian Parkinson since up until Yesterday I didn´t know she existed. So I have to rely completely on what I found out on various internet websites and I have to say I am really disappointed with imdb because you might think that as somebody who had one of the longest tenures on The Price Is Right they would have more information but they don´t even have a decent biography for her.
So I am trying to piece one together here for future reference. Born in Jacksonville, North Carolina Dian won the Miss District of Columbia USA title at age 21 and competed in the Miss World USA 1965 pageant where she placed fourth runner - up. The same year she won the Miss World USA contest and went on to represent the United States in the international Miss World contest and was first runner - up to Lesley Langley of the UK.
That year she also traveled with the Bob Hope USO Show performing in Vietnam during late December and served as the Queen of the Bob Hope Desert Classic golf tournament. But Dian´s big break came in 1975 when she landed the coveted position of one of Barker´s Beauty model on The Price Is Right. I did a little research and apparently there was a plethora of well shaped hostesses ( man, Today everything is about hostess one way or another ) although double D Dian was one of the most popular ones.
Which must have had something to do with the fact that the producers of the show knew pretty well why people watched The Price Is Right and used every excuse to put Dian´s booming ( one hundred percent all natural !!! ) 36D - 23 - 37 beachbody in a bikini or at least a swimsuit.
I mean, there really were a lot of jacuzzis, whirlpools, tanning lamps, sail boats or just bikinis that were given away as prizes and every time there was a trip to an exotic locale - or just about any place on the world - they just whipped out another tiny bikini which often could not fully contain Dani´s impressive talents, much to the delight of her numerous male fans.
The bikini barrage continued until 1993 when she left the show and in 1994 she sued The Price Is Right host and executive producer Bob Barker for sexual harassment regarding daily forced sexual acts in the late 1980s.
According to Dian Parkinson she had to spread her incredibly long and perfectly shaped legs like a fillipino hooker and let Bob use her as his personal blow up sex doll if she wanted to keep her job and he dicktamed her hard for three years, slam - banging her brains out six ways to Sunday.
Now some writers on the internet make it seem like this didn´t happen and that Dian made the whole thing up as a revenge because she was fired from The Price Is Right but I don´t think that the women who come forward with these kind of claims make them up. For that they still have to endure too much humilation and also it wouldn´t be too far fetched.
With such a sex goddess like Dian Parkinson being constantly in tiny bikinis who wouldn´t take the opportunity to put her porn star bod to the test ?
In any case, the lawsuit was withdrawn in April 1995 because it became too costly for Dian and had already taken a heavy toll on her health. But The Price Is Right´s loss was PLAYBOY magazine´s gain as they decided it was time for a 47 year old nude model and the rest is history as they say.
Parkinson was the cover girl of PLAYBOY in December 1991 and again in May 1993, appearing in nude pictorials in both issues. She also appeared in a feature newsstand publication entitled PLAYBOY Present Dian Parkinson which led to taped appearances in PLAYBOY Celebrity Centerfold : Dian Parkinson in 1993 and PLAYBOY´s Celebrities in 1999, both featuring Dian.
We stay with ultimate blonde sexbombs who have posed naked in PLAYBOY as Today´s first celebrity birthday babe is exciting Ela Weber who turns 54.
Longtime readers may remember her since one of the very first animated GIFs I EVER posted on this blog was of her erection inducing cleavage.
Born in Dettelbach, Bavaria, Germany as Manuela Hannelore Weber like so many others before her Ela had to go abroad to be successful. It´s not like she didn´t try to make it here. Ela appeared in Flieg mit Air - tl ( yep, that´s the kind of witty puns you get from german tv shows ) with Frank Elstner and applied as a host for Peep ! replacing Dieter Bohlen´s ex sex toy the exotic half sudanese Nadja Abd El Farrag. Who pretty much run the show into the ground after Dieter Bohlen´s former blow up sex doll the 34C mega MILF Verona Feldbusch made the show a huge success.
Ela would have led the show to new heights but she quit when the bosses of RTL 2 wanted to have sole control of the videos shown in the show. She also wasn´t happy with the way german shows present women in general :
" They make women come across the television screens as plain Janes. If you see the ladies on the street after the show they are better dressed and have better make up. They are almost glowing. It´s unbelievable ! "
In the late 1980s she moved to Italy where they were more appreciative of her qualities and Ela used her breast assets to the best of her abilities :
" I go completely overboard depicting the femininity of the infamous german Busenwunder. I play the caricature of the blonde sexbomb. "
Ela became famous for her various tv appearances where she displayed her titanic teutonic 36D twin torpedoes be it as a guest on such shows like Quelli Che Il Calcio with italian real life Power Girl Federica Ridolfi and the often re - posted italian mega soccer MILF Simona Ventura or as a member of the cast of such variety shows like Scherzi Aparte and Stranamore.
The former gas station owner turned model / showgirl got her big break as the assistant of Paolo Bonolis and became known to a bigger audience when she started co - hosting the Canale 5 quiz show Tira E Molla.
With such hugely developed star qual - titties it would have been crazy not to use it for the big screen and Ela has appeared in such movies as Uomini Senza Donna, A Spasso Nel Tempo, Mucho Macho and Se Lo Fai Sono Guai where she played the Doctor I wish I had during my rehab.
As a model she used her fascinating features as a spokesmodel for Playtex and her mouthwatering 36D - 24 - 36 measurements that are guaranteed to skyrocket the sales numbers of any men´s magazines can be enjoyed in a nude calendar shoot for Auto Oggi and the german edition of the PLAYBOY.
And she is very popular with the italian viewers - especially the male ones - because of her giant melons which she presents in plunging cleavages and skimpy outfits which have led to various hot wardrobe malfunctions .
With her huge set of lungs it was only a matter of time before Ela turned her attention to singing especially since her body was made for videos.
We are staying with music and another model turned actress, Leslie Parrish who celebrates her 84th birthday. Although I am not 100 % sure about that since her american wikipedia entry states her birthday is on the 18th of March. Leslie started as a talented and promising piano and composition student at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music and became a model because it earned more than as a waitress or piano teacher. She was Miss Color TV where she was the human test pattern to check the accuracy of skin tones during broadcasts but it soon became apparent that she was destined for greater things. Her first big role was in the 1959 Lil Abner musical which is the only reason why I knew her name in the first place.
Usually I list some of the birthday candidates credits but then I read that she appeared in more than 100 tv shows including Batman and Star Trek so maybe we can skip this part just for once. Coming back to the first time I saw anything with Leslie Parrish it all goes back to a video with her from the Lil Abner musical I found on YouTube. This was back when the movie people still gave a damn about being true to the original source material.
Since I have already written about Lil Abner in last year´s belated Tom Peyer birthday post including videos for the first Lil Abner movie from 1940 with Buster Keaton, an unsold tv pilot plus the Lil Abner cartoon we come to our next candidate. One of the indispensable contributors to MAD is Al Jaffe who turns 99 and who not only did a ton of the usual parodies but also his famous Clever Answers To Stupid Questions and he earned himself a place in the comic history books as the inventor of the MAD fold in pages ( you can find 13 of these over at 13th DIMENSION ).
Some say that the most sincere form of flattery is imitation and there were many magazines who tried to cash in on the success of MAD or like the german MÜD ( which means tired ) issue more a parody of a parody.
I think I may have posted an episode of Tales From The Cryptkeeper but I don´t think it was in very good quality. And while the stories are not nearly as innovative - nor gruesome - as the original EC Comics horror classics and the series is more apt for children between 3 and 6 I wanted to post some while there are a few on YouTube. I haven´t watched many episodes ( one I remember was about two kids who ended up in hell because they skipped school to play video games - educational overkill much ? ) but this one reminds me of an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Keeping the horror theme going our feature film of the day is The Blood Beast Terror a.k.a. The Vampire - Beast Craves Blood with Peter Cushing.
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The mellow sweetness of pumkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
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