Excellence in Advertising: Westinghouse 1955 Refrigerator

Before God invented Netflix and PVRs, you had to sit through a battery of commercials every time you turned on the idiot box. Most of them made you wonder why the hell Philo Taylor Farnsworth didn’t also invent something to block out commercials. Like Netflix or PVRs.

But occasionally, a television ad struck gold to where you’d sit through a seven-hour Cannon marathon to see it again. And now, thanks to the magic of YouTube (which we can thank God for inventing) you can relive the magic at the touch of a mouse. Here’s today’s nomination for Excellence in Advertising.

Once you got past the systemic racism, workplace sexism, and the threat of being beaten senseless by notorious neighbourhood thug Arthur Fonzarelli, the ’50s were pretty fucking fantastic.

For a start, everything ran like clockwork. When you left home for work, you knew damn well you’d be starting at 9 and leaving at 5. Three-martini lunches started at noon and ran until 2.

And if the Raiders—aka your kids—promised to pillage the fridge at 3:31 p.m. every day, that meant they’d be showing up at 3:31 p.m. There was none of that bullshit where you have to call them 32 times before they finally put down the PlayStation and turn off the fucking flatscreen.

You know what else was great about the ’50s? Well, fridges weren’t just well-stocked, but also meticulously organized. Check out the below ad for Westinghouse’s 1955 refrigerator. 

Not only are there enough milk bottles in that fucker to feed a stable of parched baby calves, but they’re all perfectly lined up. Seriously, there looks to be eight gallons of moo juice in the main part of the fridge, and another five in the door. Along with what appears to be at least four-dozen eggs in case the neighbourhood chicken suddenly happened to go sterile.

Evidently, no one had discovered cholesterol. 

Engineers also figured out how to load Westinghouse’s fridges with space-age juice dispensers worthy of Buzz Aldrin. Watch as the kids enjoy delicious fruit juice from concentrate “freshly mixed at the touch of a finger”. And just in case the message that fresh is best somehow slipped under the radar the first time, Westinghouse’s immaculately made-up housewife drives the message home with “the fountain automatically mixes the concentrate with just the right amount of cold water and air to give it nature’s own freshness.” 

Nature, evidently, being a Westinghouse 1955 frost-free refrigerator. Fuck the ’50s were fantastic.