Do Gooder Press

Temporary tattoos have come a long, long way since my childhood. Now, you can get photorealistic and waterproof images of your favorite logo, cartoon character, or otherwise regrettable design in every grocery store. Back in the dark ages, however, all we had were boxes of Cracker Jack, before their toy surprises really started to go downhill. One of the best things to get was these little books of tattoos. Made from food coloring, you wet your skin, slapped one of the designs on it, and then after it probably smeared itself because you didn’t hold it properly, it left colored areas on your flesh. I found two books of these at a garage sale recently, and I thought I’d share the artwork available to kids of the 60’s and 70’s, along with snarky commentary. I only got books #2 and #3, so this only a taste of the artwork available, but I think it’s fairly representative:

The first item is the cover for the booklet, which helps convey the idea of what’s in store. It’s interesting to me you can still see the brushwork on the colors used for the cover art. Moving on, we have the pincer-bug, which I interpreted as “smiling” when I was a kid, but I can see now that was a kind of cranium-coloration. The rightmost tattoo came like that in the book, the printing and cutting machines deciding to add a large amount of irony to the artwork.

The 8-ball-and-chain, a fanciful fusion of two concepts that has never been repeated for some reason. There’s also the “Have a Nice Day if the left edge of your face has been sliced off” (or is it right? I mean, these images are reversed until applied, so…). We wind up with the “Love” image, which I’m sure artist Robert Indiana was thrilled to contribute to the realm of impermanent ink.

A green handprint, signifying humanity’s constant struggle with hygiene. The anchor is a classic, of course, as we still watched “Popeye” cartoons back then. The final one on the right just proves that chicks dig tattoos. Yes, I’m ashamed of myself for that last joke, I apologize…

We come to book three, which leads off with a smiling magenta daisy and a curvy arrow, because why not?

I like to think of the first one as being titled “Astonished Walrus,” and I’m sure it’d be a ripe meme-image if it had been produced today. The sun-with-leaves-for-flames was no doubt popular among fans of Raisin Bran. The blood-soaked bunny is, I believe, where Monty Python got the idea for its killer rabbit concept, though I could be wrong about that.

The clown was controversial, as nobody enjoys their terror-causing visages, and the thought of putting them on children no doubt caused a stir. The fish wearing a hat still stands as a tribute to Don Knott’s cinematic masterpiece, The Incredible Mr. Limpet. And lastly, we have what we kids called “The only cool tattoo we ever got from Cracker Jack.” We thought it was a pirate ship, and I’ve seen it referred to as such elsewhere, but I only now noticed there’s no pirate regalia present. Ah, the power of imagination. 🙂