Jiggly salads? Groovy. | Image: Flickr/wanderingmagpie / Via Creative Commons
It's nothing short of mind boggling what dangerous, politically incorrect and otherwise unacceptable items used to pass muster in our lifetimes and those of our parents. Sometimes the ideas of cultural change and progress seem abstract; one way to see them immediately is to look back at old advertisements and media. Here is a collection of 1960s products, concepts and ideas that now seem inadvisable at best.
Babies + Cellophane equaled advertisement material, man! | Image: collectorsweekly.com
Being a smoker, I still remember smoking on planes even into the early 90s. Granted, it was an international flight, and I think there was an announcement to the effect of "international waters, smokem if you gotem".
#6, that death razor. We might have some of those still floating around. Now I'm gonna have to go dig in the medicine chest.
#9, I do remember a real-live chemistry set at some point in the early 70s. Not sure what I ever learned from it or even what chemicals were in the set.
#10, creeper crawlers or something, is the thing that made me go OMG! I remember these, that molten rubber cooking thing but for years, I couldn't find anything about it. Every time I tried to search, I kept coming up with shrinky dinks, and this was definitely not shrinky dinks. Kinda sad they didn't mention shrinky dinks. It's not too often kids were encouraged to play unsupervised with a live oven.
#11. There was a time in the 70s when McDonalds was selling glass tumblers, but it turned out the paint they used was lead-based paint. I guess not a good thing for something your mouth has intimate contact with. Heck, we might even still have them around somewhere.
The razor shown was the first "safety razor", yet they're complaining about how dangerous it *looks*. It was the first alternative to shaving with a huge dagger-looking straight razor... It was a VAST safety (and price, and convenience) improvement. Since its introduction, no US Presidents have had facial hair...
Hard to complain about the health effects of lead-based paint, when lead was in the gasoline, and being injected into the air in astronomical quantities, that dramatically reduced the brain function of everyone who lived through that era. In particular it turned cities into crime-ridden cesspools that everyone fled from... trends that only recently reversed.
No mention of driving without seat belts (or shoulder belts).
In school, when kids made things in clay to bring home, a very common item to make was an ashtray.