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The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time

The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time

What do murder, pedophilia, suicide and a baby tiger have in common? They have all been used to sell stuff in these amazingly disturbing vintage ads!

These are real, untouched advertisements from the good old days. It doesn’t matter if it’s lovely ladies or adorable clowns, somehow these old-time ad wizards found ways to traumatize us while pedaling everyday products.

Enjoy them now, call your therapist later!

15. White Bread Demon
“Bread is swell, but what I’m really excited about is eating jelly made from the blood of the innocent!”


14. French Suicide Sausage
It’s enough to make you want to eat Kosher forever.

13. A Girl Around The House
It’s nice to have a girl around the house… especially if you are a psychopath serial killer who makes women into rugs!

12. Chubby
Who needs self-esteem when you can have a free fashion book for chubbies? Also, proving that advertising weight representation has always been screwed up, the girl pictured is totally not chubby.

11. Christmas Weapons
The family that guns together, has funs together.

10. Eye patch. Shirt. Baby Tiger.
Sexy?

9. Chase & Sandborn Spanking
She totally deserves it. Seriously, what kind of woman doesn’t “store test” for fresher coffee?

8. Fry’s Chocolate Nightmare
Nothing wants to make consumers buy chocolate more than 5 faces of a sickly kid looking 5 different shades of miserable.

7. Root Beer Baby!
Mama, please DO NOT give your baby another glass of Root Beer. It is clearly doing something horrible to him. He is terrifying.

6. Locked Out
You better wash out your privates with Lysol, or your husband will install cartoon locks on the door.

5. Pears Soap Disaster
“Pears Soap- now with such a soothing lather, you won’t notice that your baby has gotten into a horrible accident!”

4. Postage Meter Murder
“Is it always illegal to kill a woman?” This is a truly important question and makes us want to buy a new postage meter.

3. Shave Yourself
The old man baby’s gonna sing karaoke into a razor! Hooray!

2. Baby Soft
JonBenét Ramsey, eat your heart out. (Too soon?) This ad makes us want to scream, gouge out our eyes and then barf.

1. Chocolate Poulain
Drink that cocoa, or this clown will murder you in your sleep.

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{ 21 comments… add one }
  • Jan Costea July 2, 2009, 2:45 pm

    The ad that advises women to use Lysol as a douche has to be the most reprehensible of this group! Wringing all of the guilt out of a sexual relationship is manipulative and can hardly be justified, especially with the present connotation of the disinfectant qualities of Lysol…hardly a product to be applied to a person’s private parts!

  • Jean July 2, 2009, 3:33 pm

    They are all so creepy and disgusting, how can one choose the worst of the lot?

  • Bill July 2, 2009, 6:32 pm

    Oh…
    my…
    God.

    What were those ad reps thinking?! Those are all so wrong, I can’t even think of all the ways they’re wrong! Sometimes, a little political correctness isn’t such a bad thing.

  • Sandy July 2, 2009, 8:49 pm

    Hands down, “Baby Soft”. Ick . The others were varied levels of disgusting/sad/bewildering, and ultimately, mostly funny.

  • Hypkill July 2, 2009, 9:38 pm

    @Bill

    Well, those were the cocaine and drug days.
    These products are the birth of their mind induced narcotics. =P
    Mhm.

  • cristina July 2, 2009, 11:10 pm

    Ok, men beating wives, child neglect, innocence is sexy!! To bad are nation isn’t as “Conservative” as it use to be!!

  • Michael July 3, 2009, 5:28 am

    ” . . . but what I’m really excited about is eating jelly made from the blood of the innocent!”

    BWAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • ellen July 3, 2009, 6:27 am

    these ads are interesting and its cool to see what society accepted back then..but the author of this article and poster of these photos…hmmm…not my cuppa tea at all

  • Melsner July 3, 2009, 12:00 pm

    Not that I’m defending anything here, but that’s clearly a different kind of Lysol than what we use today. It looks like a clear glass bottle.

    So it’s not quite the same as advocating that you use the spray bottle you keep under the sink…

  • Gnarlodious July 3, 2009, 12:43 pm

    These are the finest products capitalism has ever brought us. Now shut up and consume.

  • dhchatfield July 3, 2009, 6:38 pm

    5 and 2 are the worst I have seen but they are all pretty reprehensible!

  • Shannon K. July 3, 2009, 8:22 pm

    good ol’ Corporate America! Steer Clear!!!

  • Robin July 6, 2009, 12:09 pm

    I have to say, the French suicide sausage is just about the goriest ad I’ve seen. Although they’re all so nasty it’s hard to choose.

  • Winni-Pig July 7, 2009, 9:12 am

    I would like to see the marketing proposal that put forward the “Pears” advert….anyone know what year this is? It seems like it might relate to things going on in the world at the time of publication.

  • margjack July 10, 2009, 7:50 am

    I think the “Pears” ad references the old adage “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” – basically, families took baths oldest to youngest and the water would be so dark at the end that the baby might get thrown out.

  • Kathleen July 28, 2009, 2:03 pm

    …there just are not enough words to decribe, just this feeling in the pit of my stomach. How did our parents make it through those decades without cerebral damage? Explains the arrival of the little yellow pills!

  • Glenn (Chip) Jones March 5, 2010, 3:22 pm

    Unfotunatly advertisers didnt get disturbing over night. amazing 2 c that troubled people found a career in advertising….wow

  • GloWorm April 29, 2010, 1:33 pm

    I find all of these ads hilarious. With the exception of that child innocence is sexy thing…now that’s just creepy!

    Sign of the times. Look at other ads from that time period. It’s not like these are the only ones out there. Things were different back in the day. I can appreciate all these ads even if I don’t agree with some of the things in them. Listen to the music and watch the films from back then, same thing.

    I applaud whoever found these and brought them to our attention. It’s things like this that remind us how things used to be……and maybe we wish they still were, or are happy they are not, still that way.

  • m1l4droid May 18, 2011, 12:55 am

    This ads are going to haunt me till the day I kill myself.

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