1960s ad for rice

"My man likes something unexpected now and then. That's why I serve rice."

Later, she will travel to the moon to make it a cleaner place to live.

1960s ad for rice (Found in Mom's Basement)

[#1 posted by mujadaddy , July 22, 2008 10:16 AM]

"Rice Ideas Men Like" -- Yeah, baby... steam it...

[#2 posted by insect_hooves , July 22, 2008 10:19 AM]

"Honey? What are these .. tiny ... potatoes? There are thousands of them!"

"Not potatoes, silly -- Rice!(TM)"

[#3 posted by atomicelroy , July 22, 2008 10:30 AM]

MMMMMMM Rice. MMMMMMMMM Sex.

[#4 posted by Orchestra Spy , July 22, 2008 10:34 AM]

She certainly is a lovely looking gal. Don't give me the pouty lips doll face, I'm making rice for dinner!

[#5 posted by humanpower , July 22, 2008 10:36 AM]

Pap-reek-ah? Paprika? What the hell is that? It's a delightful new spice from the Orient, honey. I figured, as long as I'm making something exotic like rice, I might as well go all-in. Tomorrow, I'm thinking of boiling some beef and adding--get ready: pepper! But then, it will be a six-month before the merchant ships arrive again with their new fantastical delights and we shall have to once again chew on roots and look for beetles under rocks.

[#6 posted by anthony , July 22, 2008 10:39 AM]

Oh, man Insect Hooves! You have me laughing.

[#7 posted by Takuan , July 22, 2008 10:44 AM]

food and sex.... Tommy's Ann Margret and baked beans?

[#8 posted by Marcelo , July 22, 2008 10:55 AM]

"Later, she will travel to the moon to make it a cleaner place to live."

and after she gets back, she'll Watusi with the gang.

:)

[#9 posted by oscar , July 22, 2008 11:04 AM]

Somewhere in my pile of stuff I have this awesome cookbook I pilfered from my mom. It's also from the rice council, and it's called Man-Pleasing Recipes. Here's a shot of the cover:

http://www.oldcookbooks.com/product/BCBEPH770946/man_pleasing_recipes.html

I'll have to scan it and put it on flickr.

[#10 posted by pauldrye , July 22, 2008 11:11 AM]

Pap-reek-ah? Paprika? What the hell is that? It's a delightful new spice from the Orient, honey

And by "Orient", I mean "Mexico, via Hungary!"

[#11 posted by Random Chick , July 22, 2008 11:14 AM]

Rice is so unexpected. Boy, her man is lucky.

[#12 posted by HarveyBoing , July 22, 2008 11:23 AM]

What I love about these "let's make fun of the old advertising" posts is that marketing hasn't changed at all since these ads were created.

Forty years from now, people will be making fun of all the dopey, manipulative social stereotypes that are leveraged in advertising today.

The fact is, this sort of ad was a well-designed, effectively-targeted application of social engineering. We laugh now only because we find the social ideas that existed forty years ago backward and amusing. But it was effective in its time and in forty years, many of today's social ideas will seem just as backward and amusing.

Fortunately, marketing will always be doing this and in the future we'll have no shortage of examples of advertising that manipulate those ideas for the benefit of marketers that we can use to laugh at ourselves of today. :)

[#13 posted by RJ , July 22, 2008 11:37 AM]

Nowadays, we roll our hotdogs in rice made sticky with melted otter pops before frying. Cornmeal batter is so bad for you.

[#14 posted by EH , July 22, 2008 12:22 PM]

Possibly the earliest known implementation of "Blue Steel."

[#15 posted by minTphresh , July 22, 2008 12:58 PM]

when did "rice" become synonymous with " butt sex"?

[#16 posted by Hedonisbot , July 22, 2008 1:05 PM]

hahaha these are some of the funniest comments.... except #12 what a buzz kill

[#17 posted by Kriechhund , July 22, 2008 1:15 PM]

"Rice Council of America" ???

[#18 posted by Strophe , July 22, 2008 1:22 PM]

Dude, Harveyboing is right. I can see it now, the year 2058. We're all heads floating in bacta fluid, laughing about the prevalence of stock photos in advertising.

[#19 posted by V , July 22, 2008 1:33 PM]

"And after dinner, I'll dress up like one of those Akihabara cosplay girls for a spankin' good time!"

[#20 posted by the_boy , July 22, 2008 1:34 PM]

MintPhresh - had I been drinking, my beverage would be spewed all over my laptop. As it was, I'm still laughing five minutes later

[#21 posted by Orchestra Spy , July 22, 2008 1:47 PM]

Now make me coffee.
A GOOD cup of coffee BITCH! hahaha, jk

[#22 posted by semiotix , July 22, 2008 2:22 PM]

Here we go, another thread full of snarky 20-somethings who think they invented rice. Well, guess what, kiddies, it ain't so. Your great-grandmother was doing things with rice that would make you blush. Hell, in Victorian London there were whole shops that sold nothing but rice.

But no, go on telling yourself that rice is only for hip young folk like yourself. I can't wait until you find your own kids' stash of Uncle Ben's and they tell you "oh, you wouldn't understand."

[#23 posted by Aaron T. , July 22, 2008 3:33 PM]

The Rice Council of America, now known as the USA Rice Federation?

[#24 posted by buddy66 , July 22, 2008 3:36 PM]

I spent a week at a really rural commune back in the day. The staple was, of course, rice; and all of it was prepared from the 'Tassajara Cookbook,' which was/is a Zen center south of SFX. Of course it was all brown, rough rice recipes, and pretty damn good. In fact, rice was THE staple of the entire ''Back to the land'' movement; it was ubiquitous.

One day a clearly concerned straight couple came to visit their daughter, who had gone back to the land with a long-haired boddhisatva and was living in a teepee. They expressed their concerns to me, since I was the straightest-looking man there, and I attempted to allay their fears and assure them that their daughter was in no danger from the strange-looking vegetarians. They had brought sacks of food for the commune, having stopped at a supermarket in a nearby town, and began unloading them from their station wagon.

''I understand,'' the woman said nervously, ''I understand they like rice, and they eat a lot of it.''

And she unloaded six large boxes of . . . Minute Rice.

[#25 posted by Anonymous , July 22, 2008 5:24 PM]

The ad is likely to be playing with the name of celebrity British prostitute Mandy Rice-Davies who was invoved in the Profumo Affair (along with Christine Keeler) in the 1960s.

The picture isn't of Mandy, but there is a resemblance to one of her more famous photos see http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/9/98/MandyRiceDavies.jpg

[#26 posted by Anonymous , July 22, 2008 6:23 PM]

Minute rice! Is that a true story, Buddy 66? It's amazing.

[#27 posted by stephenhumphrey , July 22, 2008 8:06 PM]

Rice: the other white starch!

[#28 posted by Xenu , July 23, 2008 12:11 AM]

"I didn't expect a kind of rice..."
[jarring chord]
"NOBODY expects RICE!"

[#29 posted by Takuan , July 23, 2008 12:25 AM]

brown the pound of ground beef with salt and pepper and yellow onion in a little oil, at the same time,prepare 3 cups of minute rice and half a green cabbage cut into 3 cm squares and boiled in very little water to wilting but still crisp. Combine the ground beef, rice and cabbage over heat (wok), season with powdered Allspice and white pepper, add half a white onion minced, raw. Good for lunches hot or cold. Vegan perverts can substitute phony hamburger with success. The allspice is the key, the white pepper the afternote.

[#30 posted by Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator , July 23, 2008 6:11 AM]

HarveyBoing @12: Naaaah. Back in the day, that was still a dumb ad. The woman's as elaborately ornate as a geisha. Her hair is freshly washed (for a lot of women back then, more a weekly than a daily event) and professionally styled, and she's just had a full-face makeup job.

It's not an end-of-the-day working-woman look, and certainly not like someone who's just been cooking. But if you assume she's staying home all day, "My man" is either the wrong diction for her class, or is deliberately suggestive, a hint that rather than being married, she's the high-priced spread. "My man likes something unexpected now and then" has a definite subtext of sexual variation.

(Mintphresh @15 said it first and best.)

Then you discover she isn't pondering exciting underwear or installing a trapeze in the bedroom; what she has on her mind is rice. The idea was to make rice seem glamorous and sexy. It was way dumb. I probably resented it at the time. I know I remember resenting other ads of its ilk.

Your piece about how old ads will always seem goofy ignores one thing: marketing and advertising aren't static bodies of expertise. Those dogs learn new tricks all the time. (Compare the primitive, diffuse advertisements of 1950s television with nationally televised ads today.) That's a good part of the reason this ad seems goofy now: we've gotten more sophisticated.

The other reason I disagree with you is that funny is where you find it. Telling people they're finding something funny for the wrong reasons is about as productive as telling them they should find something funny when they don't.

[#31 posted by buddy66 , July 23, 2008 6:38 AM]

@#26Anonymous,

Oh, yeah. It was sort of a defining moment. Thinking of it now it's of course sad, but the vegans and I found it amusing then. The woman WAS trying to understand.

[#32 posted by iamelectionday , July 23, 2008 10:14 AM]

it's creepy; look at her neck and shoulders. Giraffe-female human hybrid maybe? i think it may have been whatever the equivalency of 60s photoshopped was then. =o)

[#33 posted by minTphresh , July 26, 2008 10:35 AM]

60's photo shop was then...THE AIRBRUSH!