Advertising

Three advertisements for the drug Antiminth which is used to treat pinworm infections. The advertisements are pop up posters meant to be hung on a wall. Each features one of 3 different fables. The fables featured are the Boy and the Lion, the Ant and the Grasshopper, and the Boy Who Cried Wolf. The images accompanying each fable appear to have originally been created with pieces of felt, then photographed and reprinted on cardboard. Captions below the images tell the story of the respective fable. Behind each pop-up folder is an advertisement for the medication. Each advertisement came with a letter from the company addressed to the doctor. The letters give a witty description that leads into the selling of the drug, and how the moral of the story relates to health. 

This Franco-Italian production starred Leslie Caron, Rossano Brazzi, Monica Vitti, Sylva Koscina, Charles Aznavour, and Anna Karina. It was produced by Janus Films. It is described as “3 witty and wonderful tales of marriage and what comes before… and after!”  The advertisements, describing how wonderful the movie is, seem meant for newspapers and motion picture theaters.  My search for a copy of the film itself goes on…

I find the artistry of these advertisements spectacular!  Getting them has already set me on a quest to get the others in the set of 19 listed on the flyleaves of the envelope.  There is plenty of humor in these illustrations!  The advertisements seem to be for various products of Laboratoires M. De Rive in Paris.  One of the two TH advertisements for Strongénol – the one with brown foreground rather than green -- was actually sent as a postcard, unfortunately without a clear date stamp.  The Gabutti signature is different in these two cards.  The products are sometimes worked cleverly into the fable scene, as when the crane doctor brings a tube of ointment to wounded wolf.  The crow is similarly dropping not a cheese to a flatterer but medicine to a sick fox with his head bandaged up.  Now the full set has arrived, found on French Ebay at the time I was cataloguing the original set here.  These six new cards have their own treats.  The old man is trying to reveal to his sons not the glory of a well-worked family inherited plot of land but rather the glory of cash!  The country mouse is recommending Voxynox to his city slicker cousin.  There is lots of fun to be had here!

Clever parodies of La Fontaine.  "Le Chat et l'Oiseau" is a parody of WL: whatever explanations the little bird makes, the cat will eat the bird.  GA is composed in particularly idiomatic slang verse, but I think it comes to something like this: a rogue having knocked about all summer comes to an old haunt and asks for a few rounds, offering only a brush in payment.  The innkeeper asks what he did all summer and then responds that he can brush now.  A barber snoozes and dreams that he has established a high-class shop in Paris and makes lots of money.  He is awakened to give a local a shave.  As La Fontaine wrote, we all construct castles in Spain.  The mountain brings forth a little tube that later becomes famous worldwide.

It is easy to find Gobey laxatives on the web and many humorous cards they produced for their laxative syrup, meant particularly for children, young women, and older people.  These cards to color do not show up among them.  For me, the best of these three is the one that a young hand started to imitate but got only as far as some orange and a very little bit of brown.  The coloration and facial expressions are particularly well done in this colored scene.

What is so lovely about these advertisements is that each uses the well-known fable situation to work in a claim for the advertised product.  So the "talkative turtle" could not sustain his flight holding on to the stick carried by the two ducks because he did not use Dentol to make his teeth strong.  The tortoise was besting the hare because he took Goudron Guyot.  The rat who retired from the world secure himself inside not a big wheel of cheese but a wheel of Dentol.  The lamb that is normally eaten by the wolf offers him instead a some paste for his cough.  Enjoy the twist of the fable in each case and click on the saying or picture to see a bigger rendition.  

Because in many ways the backs of these cards are more interesting than the fronts, I will include each here.  They seem to be tips for pupils, always including an advertisement for Nestlé chocolate in one form or another.  Some backs recommend reaching to Nestlé during the times when one gets hungry between meals, for example.  The "applied" fables seem to me to be forced, as when a monkey's opening a can of Nestlé saves the day for a bear family.  The true story of FG turns out to include a young student who had his Nestlé and knew that the grapes were good.  He got one of them!  The versos offer fascinating inquiries.  "Did you do your work this week?"  "Let's make a collection!"  "When your grandparents were babies."  "Do you like dishes with cream?"  My, what questions!  4¾' x 7". 

The continuity of style is striking between the two light-stock cards.  Is it fair to see these stories as fables?