Charles Addams, George Price, and William Steig for Kodak Instamatic Movie Cameras

In 1968, Kodak used art by three New Yorker cartoonists to promote the company's new Instamatic movie camera. And what better way to sell the new technology than to remind people how cumbersome the old technology was?

Charles Addams's take on those old movie cameras is not merely "mysterious," it's downright creepy.

Charles Addams
Remember when movie
cameras were big, expensive,
and mysterious?
Kodak has changed all that.
The New Yorker, April 20, 1968, page 32

Charles Addams
End of mystery.
The New Yorker, April 20, 1968, page 33

Charles Addams
Remember when movie
cameras were big, expensive,
and mysterious?
Kodak has changed all that.
The New Yorker, April 20, 1968, pages 32-33

https://archives.newyorker.com/?iid=16478&crd=0&searchKey=Remember%20when%20movie%20#folio=032

George Price looks back on those days when the gift of a movie camera called for some serious analysis:

George Price
Only yesterday
any man who gave his wife
a movie camera
was considered unusual.
Kodak has changed all that.
The New Yorker, May 18, 1968, page 18

George Price
Only yesterday
any man who gave his wife
a movie camera
was considered unusual.
Kodak has changed all that.
The New Yorker, May 18, 1968, page 19

George Price
Only yesterday
any man who gave his wife
a movie camera
was considered unusual.
Kodak has changed all that.
The New Yorker, May 18, 1968, Pages 18-19

https://archives.newyorker.com/?iid=16482&crd=0&searchKey=Kodak%20has%20changed%20all%20that.#folio=018

William Steig remembers when the home movie buff had to keep it all undercover.

William Steig
You used to have to thread movie
film, shoot some, flip it, rethread it and
hide in the shade a lot.
Kodak has changed all that.
The New Yorker, July 13, 1968, page 18

William Steig
You used to have to thread movie
film, shoot some, flip it, rethread it and
hide in the shade a lot.
Kodak has changed all that.
The New Yorker, July 13, 1968, page 19

William Steig

You used to have to thread movie

film, shoot some, flip it, rethread it and 

hide in the shade a lot.

Kodak has changed all that.

The New Yorker, July 13, 1968, pages 18-19

https://archives.newyorker.com/?iid=16490&crd=0&searchKey=Kodak%20has%20changed%20all%20that.#folio=018

Note:  Did I miss something? There could very well be other examples of this advertising campaign that were published in the pages of the New Yorker. Please inform me if you know of any such additional ads.

And by all means please contact me if you can provide scans or photos of original art or rare published advertisements by any of the cartoonists in this post.


Quick Links to the Attempted Bloggery Archives:

Charles Addams

George Price

William Steig

The New Yorker

Advertising

Attempted Bloggery's Camera Shy Index

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Twenty-Five Years of the Internet

Early in our marriage when my wife first suggested getting a computer, it was mostly a word-processor she was after. We certainly had no awareness of the internet then, and as a practical matter it had not yet taken the world by storm. I had taken a computer class in college, and I thought I knew a little something about those temperamental machines. "I don't have the time to write any programs for it," was my weary response.

Today we're celebrating the 25th birthday of the internet, which was created with the software and protocols of Tim Berners-Lee. It became available through CERN in 1991 and it was remarkably free of charge and free of oversight. Certainly it has been one of the great life-altering inventions of my lifetime, the other being the cell phone. I don't get to spend as much time in libraries as I'd like, but the internet, to a large degree, is an extensive venue for getting essential information from all over the world, and it is relatively user-friendly.

More content is added to the internet every day, making it a fluid resource that improves consistently over time. For someone like me whose interests are often rather obscure, it has been invaluable. For almost three years now I've been making my own daily contribution to the internet via this blog, adding at least some content that would not be available otherwise. Why, you're very welcome.

Valuable things disappear from the internet every day as well. My favorite massively multiplayer online roll playing game was Toontown Online. I even kept two accounts so I could play at the same time as my daughter. Disney pulled the plug on the "toontastic" game last year, for me leaving a vast hole in internet entertainment. Over the years, programmers had invested a huge amount of creative energy and technical know-how in the game, but in the end it was the accountants who made the fateful decision and likely hackers who forced it on them.

In the years before I created this blog, I put a lot of personal effort into labeling my photos on Kodak Gallery, now defunct, and writing reviews on Living Social, now all deleted. Many people put huge efforts into Geocities before it was condemned. I still feel it's such a waste when unique items disappear off the eBay site permanently after three months, and countless auction houses choose not to maintain their online archives indefinitely. If Blogger ever disappears, I don't have a backup copy of this blog. The price of memory and storage have gone way down, but the lesson, so far as I can see, is that, unlike diamonds, websites are not forever.

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