Thursday, August 21, 2008

TV tie-in merchandise that makes you say "Huh?"

Okay, everybody knows Laverne DeFazio and Shirley Feeney both worked in the Shotz Brewery, until the sixth season when they moved to Burbank and took jobs at Bardwell's Department Store. In the final season, when Shirley got married and left, Laverne began working in an aerospace testing facility.
They why, pray tell, would Harmony Toys market a LAVERNE & SHIRLEY Secretary set? I don't think they were ever employed as office workers, but I could be wrong. Even then,  why...oh why would each item in this "set" be of a different scale? It looks like there's a yellow princess phone and clipboard  that are relatively in the same proportion, but then there's a book & trophy case that looks much smaller and a ruler and calculator that are absolutely huge compared to everything else. I guess one could argue that the ruler needed to be a certain size to avoid choking, but unless the calculator really worked (which it clearly doesn't) , why would it need to be so large? Also - they didn't have calculators during the late 1950s, early 1960s when the show was set! These things bother me. In fact what bothers me most are the two items I cannot identify. The white plastic object with red buttons looks like another phone, or answering machine - which are also NOT period accurate and the other white item looks like a dirty cigarette or a rolled up dollar bill (for sniffing coke?)! Basically what we have here is a bunch of plastic crap left over from other toys that they decided to package and sell as a LAVERENE & SHIRLEY playset. I'm not amused.

3 comments:

Danny in WeHo said...

HELLO???
The white thing with red buttons is clearly a TIME MACHINE used to opperate the calculator, which doesn't work in the 50's and the other white thing is a rolled up map of the future, so you know where to stop to use the calculator... you don't want to go too far in the future, because your calculator will be out of style somewhere mid-90's.

Tony Z™ said...

The white thing with red buttons looks to me sort of like a typewriter. You may be too young to remember those...
As for the coke straw -- maybe that was a wink to something we don't know about Laverne and Shirley. Lenny and Squiggy were kinda strange...

Doug said...

If it's a typewriter, then it's also completely out of scale. But as you say, I'm way too young to know what a typewriter is...LOL