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Seriously Bad Taste Merchandise

It was entirely in keeping with the way the films were marketed in the USA, where horrors were treated as essentially kids' stuff. Dating-age kids, maybe - Dracula's scars were typically compared to love-bites! In the UK, Hammer liked the X-Certificate so much that it complained if its more tepid offerings were saddled with a wimpish 'A.' :cskull:
This all goes back to the 50's USA sensationalised horror comics scene that parents were horrified about, I think FT magazine did an article on that once, the EC comics and the like .. I used to buy Scream comic in the early 80's that was suitably dark, weird and sometime gory but other than that we had to wait for films like Creepshow to keep the candle burning .. about the same time, my parents took us to Tenerife on holiday and I bought a load of EC type comics from a magazine stall that also sold hardcore sex (including bestiality) magazines .. and I was only about ten year old FFS! .. happy times :smoke:

 
The moral panic about horror comics was led by Dr Fredric Wertham, a man who was so obsessed with sex and violence that he saw it everywhere, to the point that they should have been concerned about his sanity. He thought there were vaginas drawn on superheroes' muscles, for instance. But a lot of people were taken in by him.
 
I once saw an LCD game where you attempted to fly an airplane into the World Trade Center. With a picture of Bin Laden on the casing.
 
Blimey, I never thought this thread would take off so! It doesn't half make me feel old though! It seems I'm a good decade too past it to have grown up on the Garbage Pail Kids. (I presume this was a skit on The Cabbage Patch dolls? If so, I'm darkly amused)!

One consolation is that I'm still too fresh out of thew womb to recall postcards of train crashes and the like.The friend who mentioned them to me implied that they were being phased out in the seventies and could only be found still in the small rural town that he grew up in.

(Well, at least they didn't have swastikas on them!)
 
Blimey, I never thought this thread would take off so! It doesn't half make me feel old though! It seems I'm a good decade too past it to have grown up on the Garbage Pail Kids. (I presume this was a skit on The Cabbage Patch dolls? If so, I'm darkly amused)!

One consolation is that I'm still too fresh out of thew womb to recall postcards of train crashes and the like.The friend who mentioned them to me implied that they were being phased out in the seventies and could only be found still in the small rural town that he grew up in.

(Well, at least they didn't have swastikas on them!)

I read bits and pieces of local history and I very often find postcards of floods, fires and train crashes--usually the aftermaths. The seem to be most common in the period 1900 to 1945 in the UK, and the date/year and location is almost always recorded--often on the rear but also on the front as a caption. I think that along with civic events they were used to mark the passage of local time as, where I am from, the great storm of '87 and the standstill from that year's epic snow are still recalled. The repeated observation and 'cultural currency' of such events are what bound smaller communities, back when they were worthy of such a title: knowledge and first-hand experience of these disasters marked one as an insider, not an incomer, and denoted longevity and by association wisdom, back when such things mattered.

http://www.kentonline.co.uk/maidstone/news/remembering-the-1987-whiteout-118663/

Let's not forget either that at that time postcards were in much greater functional use. They would be used to acknowledge receipt of a gift, make arrangements for visits or send advice--more postcards were in circulation, and although many were blank, mass photography would now adorn a simple missive as a commemorative stamp might enliven an envelope.
 
How about this one:
neck_tie_9_11_we_will_never_forget.jpg
 
Faceless Islamic dolls .... guaranteed to give your kids nightmares (this doll is not provided with stones)

It is the Islamic belief that everyone will immediately fall to idolatry and worship of any artificial human form depicted with a face, little dolls included. Their response is to make the mistake of creating idols to the Faceless One.
 
I liked the Star Trek christmas ornament from Hallmark, showing that most cheery, christmassy scene: Spock dying from radiation poisoning.

1450844475787388961.jpg
Spock inspires Labour's election slogan 'for the many, not the few'.
 
Maybe not really meant as a fashion line but it is controversial.

The Dutch rail infrastructure operator has defended its controversial "fashion line" featuring replicas of torn clothing worn by those killed and injured in railway accidents.

ProRail launched "Victim Fashion" to encourage young people to be safer around railway lines. The campaign has faced backlash, with the Dutch infrastructure secretary saying it went too far.

But ProRail told the BBC it was "necessary" amid rising fatalities. It says the number of people killed on and around railways has almost tripled since 2016, with 17 fatalities recorded last year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47830103
 
What's bad taste about that?
 
It's not especially bad taste and was clearly done with his permission, the idea of a Stephen Hawking Action Figure is just blackly humorous in and of itself.
 
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