Monday, October 14, 2019

Won't You Be My Frankenstein?

Today being the 14th and the season of Halloween makes for the pefect day to show this oddball Valentine.  Marked "Valentine No. 37" and copyrighted by "CVC", I'd never seen one like it before.


I like this version of Frankenstein, even its odd positioning of the bolts in his temples instead of his neck. Kind of makes more sense if the electric is supposed to be sent to his brain.  The traditional positioning would just shock your epiglottis.

Doing some investigation, I found it was part of a series of "insult" Valentines.  I still don't know who CVC was or the official name of the series, but they probably date from the 1960's.  The Frankenstein Valentine was the only monster-related one I found.  The rest are just fun (and sometimes pretty mean) jabs at the recipient. I can't imagine kids being allowed to hand these out in class anymore.




Our friend, and fellow Cryptykeeper, Mr. Karswell did this post and this post way back in 2013 on these and has a lot of more examples.

I also found these other Frankenstein-themed Valentines here.





Again with the "temple bolts".



And again! 

I decided to do a little Googling (it's the least I could do. No, really, it was the least I could do.) and found this forum from 2012 that debated this very conundrum. The consensus then seemed to be that it was to avoid copyright infringement with Universal Studios.

Finally, enjoy this Alice Cooper song put to wacky video clips. And Valentine, this Halloween, won't you be my Frankenstein?

3 comments:

  1. i love the "I DIG YOU" one!

    and i never noticed the "bolts on head" vs "bolts on neck" thing. weird!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Holy smokes - some of those are very mean. But overall, the Frankenstein ones are just cool.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tom: Email me at chrisottopa@gmail.com. I have a question. -- Chris from Papergreat.

    ReplyDelete

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