Originally published at: Vintage hand-colored photo of a serious man holding a giant fish | Boing Boing
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This picture was popularized in a cod liver oil ad.
And that image was copied other times
ETA: Broken link
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My father once tried to give this repulsive drink to my brothers and me. Of course we hate it. He had memories of taking it in the 1940s and thought it would be some kind of panacea. When we asked if he liked it, he had to admit that he ran away whenever he saw our grandmother with a spoon full of that viscous, smelly liquid.
Nowadays we have versions of this emulsion with fruit flavors and a mild smell.
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My face would also look serious (or worse really) if I got fish slime all over me like that. And then smelled like it too.
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Clearly getting ready for a dating profile picture.
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I think its a:
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Or, are those tiny, tiny houses?
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To paraphrase the late humorist Patrick McManus, cod liver oil doesn’t work by curing you, but by tasting so awful that you’ll do anything to avoid getting sick again.
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And you’ve given us a likely answer to Popkin’s question
Here’s more info about the company including its use of the image:
I couldn’t end this post without touching on the company’s famous trade mark of a Norwegian fisherman with a huge cod hanging from his shoulders.
[…]Fowler’s interview [a 1917 interview with then president of the firm, P.H. Fowler] talked of how the idea was born.
The idea for this figure originated with Mr. Scott. He was on a visit of inspection of the cod fisheries of Norway when he saw a fisherman coming up the beach with a leviathan cod flung over his back, just as the figure looks. The fish weighed some 137 pounds. The successful advertising mind saw in the episode material for a figure to impress the fact that the basis of his commodity is cod liver oil. Had he been casting about deliberately for a symbol of his business, he could hardly have chosen more happily.
The public began thinking of Scott’s Emulsion in terms of this fisherman and his fish, similar to GEICO’s gecko today.
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And when that picture was taken, how long did he have to stand still to get a good exposure?
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If anyone doesn’t care to go to the instagram page, they still have a Flickr page.
Image below is a link. Onebox is goofy.
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Poor fish. Standing on the back of a Man for a long, long time. You have my simpathy Mr. Cod!
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“Innsmouth man and wife, 1830.”
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cod liver oil is used as a gag in countless episodes of little rascals, three stooges, looney toons, tom & jerry; anything from that era.
I was watching a little rascals marathon a few weeks ago and now that I have the internet in my pocket, I finally looked it up.
the only medical use it has is as a laxative (!), and it was phased out because of it’s tendency towards explosive diarrhea. but somehow Big CLO hoodwinked adults into thinking it was a panacea and especially for children, but it was also doled out as a punishment, since the adults thought it was good for them, it was less violent than spankings.
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Cod liver magnates: the Sacklers of the 19th century.
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Well there were two variants. One was produced from steaming livers and this was a decent vitamin supplement and didn’t taste bad. The other was produced by letting livers rot in a barrel and this produced a horrible tasting brown oil that caused diarrhea. Guess which one was cheaper and widely available.
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You should know me well enough by now that I rarely look serious and never when fish are involved!
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I can’t stop watching that poor puppers go down into the drink…
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