Friday, October 28, 2022

King Kong, the 1968? pillow

 One face:

The other face:


Purchased for me, whether or not at my urging I have no memory, presumably sometime around 1968, when I had seen some number of runs of King Kong, which had had no few public-domain prints circulating, on local tv broadcasts...I had seen the film about ten times, at least, by the time I was six years old (in '7o), and have no clear memory of Not having this pillow around. Presumably my mother sewed up a part of it for me, after rough treatment and/or the Cheena River flood (in Fairbanks, Alaska) in 1967 caused it some damage. That such a pillow was mass-produced sometime in the mid-late '60s gives some indication of how much a Very Young audience was taken with KK in those years, if the KK/Gojira film and similar ripoffs and the 1960s cartoon series and other similar ripoffs in that arena didn't make that clear. 

Have you had anything Rosebud-esque that has managed to survive a similar passage, so far?

6 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Remarkable how many selfies Google image search registers as similar to this.

Charlie Ricci said...

My Mother's old 78 RPM records that I used to play on my portable record player - mostly big band but a lot of Bing & Frank too. I wasn't even in school yet when she let me have them. Sadly, I broke a few. When she cleaned out her house I took them and kept them until 2 years ago when I gave them to my neighbor who had just inherited a hand crank Victrola that he could play them on. It was great because they survived. I didn't have to throw them away. They were so sentimental to me that I kept them in my basement for 40 years even though I had nothing to play them on. The one with the best memories for me was Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo," America's 1st gold record. GO PHILLIES!

Todd Mason said...

Cool. I have a turntable, but I'll have to check if it has a stylus set for 78s, as my family's Panasonic in the '70s did. I have a couple/few 78 albums. Many more LPs from my parents' collection.

Phillyradiogeek said...

Literally every person I know on the Internet would LOVE to have this! Very cool!

neer said...

No nightmares with this pillow?!

Todd Mason said...

Less so, Neeru, than from the film itself! In fact, I had a recurring nightmare as a small child in which Kong is reaching in through a window to catch me, and, eventually, I became self-aware enough of the fact it was a nightmare that I was able to calm myself down in the nightmare while still asleep. About age five. This would be how I became a lifelong (so far) lover of horror narrative...it does help one cope with terror.

Brian, someone is selling a "vintage" stuff it yourself kit of essentially the same two printed fabrics, pre-sewn as a bag, essentially--this also came up with a Google Images search. and perhaps others are selling them elsewhere. I would recommend the same sort of lightest foam possible, as mine has, so as not to stress the ancient (well, fifty yearsish old) fabric too much.