Mad Men and the Kodak Carousel



I've watched ten Mad Men episodes in the past week, and I'm all but dreaming of Don and Peggy. For those of you who don't know, Mad Men focuses on the advertising industry in the early '60s in New York, and the resulting campaigns.

One of the home runs Don Draper hits the first season is the campaign for the first slide carousel from Kodak. It's pretty interesting-- watch the clip above. My one complaint: those images do not look rich enough to be Kodachrome.

I know Mad Men tries to be historically accurate, so I searched for the original 1961 ad, but no dice.

I did find these early ads:




r3594a.jpg

This one above is from 1963

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I also found this very interesting article about the history of Kodak over at Creative Pro, which includes other slide projector ads from the same era:


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Mmm I love me a slide projector.
| Comments (2)

2 Comments

"It's pretty interesting-- watch the clip above. My one complaint: those images do not look rich enough to be Kodachrome."

they probably thought the real stuff didn't look "old" enough

why would it have to be kodachrome?
Ektachrome existed from the 1940s
some of the shots are indoors with ambient light it seems pretty unlikely that they would have been taken with Kodachrome 25 [ASA/ISO].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ektachrome
[ Readers familiar with old National Geographic magazines will recall the distinctive look of Ektachrome, used for decades for color shots wherever Kodachrome was too slow. [1]]


also there is some ambient light in the room where the slides are projected which lower the contrast.
the whole clip embraces a desaturated look -
which desaturates the projected slides.

is it a cool show? i dont have a TV but maybe i can catch it online?
but anyway fiction is fiction it always looks different than reality.

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