Here's a neat recent find: an old, hand painted 1¢ nudie cutie, coin-op title card from, I'm guessing, the 1920's or 30's. These "NOW PLAYING" ads slid into the framework of the machine just above the viewing window, enticing the movie fan to plunk in their hard-earned penny and get themselves a titillating little peepshow (ie a series of multiple cards that flipped inside the machine to create an animated illusion experience.) And the exciting subject this time around appeared to have been a young lady stripping down to take a nice relaxing vapor (aka steam) bath. How explicit did this actually get? The mind truly staggers at the possibilities! As mentioned, the card is hand painted and hand lettered in a lovely color combination of greens and turquoise blues, and the photo of our "star" glued onto the card appears to have been hand colored as well. It is also much appreciated that whoever owned this card previously had the foresight to frame it before any additional damage occurred, as clearly it's a bit rough around the edges. If anyone can unearth more information about this film short (or even the actress name) please leave a comment-- thank you! I've rounded out the post below with a few b/w images found online of other vintage coin-op peepshows!
Super nice find! I love all the pictures of twelve year old kids doling out their pennies, too.
ReplyDeleteI think The Vapor Bath in its entirety falls under the category Lost Media.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could shed some light on this subject, but the trail is as cold as ice (unlike those who viewed this, who were warmed up by the performance.)
Hey, didn't those kids need to save their pennies to buy horror comics???
ReplyDeleteI never thought about how those cards were produced; I mean, I always thought everything was mass produced but it's so interesting to see them hand made. I assume whoever got the show cards took one from the beginning and then framed it into their home-made sign.
That's really cool!
It's possible that some signs were in fact "mass made", (I could see Mutoscope likely doing that), but could be this one came from a smaller distributor, or maybe coin op arcades made new signs of their own, retitling machines that had been around for awhile (the way they do with movies) to get more money out of a stale title that everyone's already seen a bunch of times or whatever. Who knows...
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