Nowadays, the Beano is full of paid ads trying to sell things to kids. Or at least there were ads in it the last time I noticed them, which might have been quite a while ago now I come to think of it. I should probably check my facts a bit better before I start a blog post with that kind of assertion. But the point I'm leading up to here is that back in the good old 1980s, the Beano didn't contain paid ads. Mostly. But that doesn't mean the comic was entirely free of commercial interest, especially when Christmas was coming up.
Beano No. 2261, Nov. 16th, 1985, is actually selling quite a lot of things to us. The Dennis the Menace story on the front and back covers ends with Dennis urging us to buy the 1986 Beano calendar. I have a feeling I got it for Christmas that year. The Bash Street Kids story on the centre pages features a bus with a "1986 Beano Annual now on sale" poster on it. The bottom of the Pup Parade page has a little ad encouraging readers to "start your Comic Library collection now!" (which interestingly gives no hint to people who might not be a aware as to what Comic Libraries actually are). Little Plum's half-page slot is replaced by an ad for the 1986 Beano Book and Dandy Book. (Plum and Biffo the Bear had half a page each at this time, and one or the other was regularly replaced by this kind of ad).
Most interesting are a pair of adverts for other weekly comics. Is the build-up to Christmas really the best time to try to get Beano readers to start picking up another title as well? I guess at least someone thought so. The bottom quarter of Tom, Dick and Sally's page is taken up by an ad for a super free gift in this week's Twinkle!
Twinkle was 'the picture paper specially for little girls', a demographic not famous for liking the Beano. You can see why they chose this page to put the Twinkle ad - Sally is one of the few Beano characters who might even consider buying the Twinkle, and even she isn't really the bobbly-bead-necklace type.
For the record, the only other female characters in the Beano at this time (excluding all the mums, of course) were Minnie the Minx, Ivy the Terrible, Toots the Bash Street Kid and Peeps from Pup Parade - all of them tomboys who wouldn't be seen dead with a Twinkle - and Liz and Rosie from Lord Snooty (Polly has disappeared by this time, it seems). Rosie especially is more of a Twinkle reader, but maybe there wasn't space on Snooty's page.
You'd need Lord Snooty's income to buy the Twinkle regularly, anyway - 22p, at a time when the Beano was only 16p! That necklace had better be really good, is all I can say!
But most fascinating of all is the ad in the bottom quarter of Roger the Dodger, for the exciting new comic Hoot!
I definitely remember reading this comic when it first came out in 1985. Mainly because I didn't watch Minder, and had no idea what the jokes were about. So I guess it wasn't an all-time favourite Roger the Dodger for me, but at least it stuck in my memory! I didn't remember the astonishingly off-model depiction of Walter the Softy in the final panel, though, and I had no memory at all of the Hoot ad with the terrific space-age 3D hologram!
That ad must have disappeared from my memory pretty quickly, in fact, because in what was maybe 1986 or maybe 1987, on our annual summer holiday at Butlin's in Skegness, my brother and I got very into those holograms!
Every night after going to the cinema to watch the cartoons, we'd get a pack of sweet cigarettes (that wonderful gateway confectionery to a lifelong smoking habit, which they strangely don't seem to sell any more) which came with a really cool hologram alien sticker!
These packages are the subject of recent internet research - looking at them, I definitely remember the colour schemes, and think these must have been the same ones we bought, but I had no recollection of the name "Hologrems" or the Monster Pack you could send off for. The only really memorable thing was the stickers, each showing a different alien in front of a colourful 3-D landscape of smoke and volcanoes!
There were 24 different aliens, as it turns out. I didn't know that at the time, because we always seemed to get Gormsson over and over again. Isn't that always the way with these things? I got a purple box one night to see if that would make a difference, and got the awesome Jamangi, one of the four landscape-oriented stickers. My brother did the same, got Gormsson again and threw a wild tantrum about it. That's the kind of happy childhood holiday triumphant memory that everyone treasures forever, right?
Anyway, the interesting thing about that ad in the Beano is that it doesn't say "Hologrems", but uses the same font to just say "Hologram". It makes me wonder. I didn't remember the name on the candy-stick packs at all, but everything you can find about them on the internet nowadays (which isn't much) seems to suggest they were always called Hologrems. Was the "Hologram" name used with the Hoot free gift an early placeholder name from before they settled on a title? Or were they originally sold as grams instead of grems, and only got the cool new name when someone dreamed up the Log Book (which details at amazing length the personality of each monster!) in 1987?
I wish I was some kind of memory man, so I could recall whether I bought Holograms or Hologrems, and whether it was in '86 or '87. It's the kind of thing that might remain a mystery forever. Unless I come across another old Beano with an enlightening advert!
