The year 1955 was not a good one to be a raccoon. In fact, if you were such a masked critter, chances were pretty good you’d lose your tail and skin to a fad called “Coonskin Caps.”
In the mid-1950’s, Walt Disney was a dominant program on TV. Families gathered around their Zenith, Philco or RCA black and white sets on a Saturday night, set up the trays for TV Dinners and watched whatever Disney had to offer. One series of shows, starring Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, took the nation by storm.
“Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee”, Davy wore, of course, a coonskin cap, and so did millions of other “little pioneers” of the Fifties. Raccoon pelts were in such high demand that the price shot up from a quarter to eight dollars a pound in one year.
Disney licensed not only coonskin caps, but also hundreds of other products with Davy’s blessings, including lunch boxes, bath towels, ukuleles and pajamas. Davy Crockett and coonskin caps were among the many Fads of the Fifties.
At that time, America was ripe for change and open to most anything that came along. Before things ever went “viral” on the web, things went ballistic in the burgeoning American society. Things like Hula Hoops. The Wham-O Toy Company introduced the plastic, circular hoops in 1957. They were inexpensive, and with little or no marketing, the toy manufacturer sold 25 million Hula Hoops in two months.
The hoops were named after the hula dance, which required lots of hip swiveling. Girls seemed infinitely more at home with Hula Hoops than did the men-folk. Small children were even more adept at swinging the hoops around their midriffs for extended periods of time.
While America took to Hula Hoops like a puppy dog to milk, other nations were repelled. They were outlawed in Japan because they could lead to “improprieties” and the Soviet Union pronounced the Hula Hoops as simply “representing the emptiness of American society.”
But the openness to new trends was a leading factor in the explosion of the American economy. While other nations thought about things, Americans were inventing and buying things and celebrating the fact that they were American.
Other fads of the Fifties have actually continued into modern times. 3-D movies, for one. The television boom caused quite a stir in the movie industry, so the executives in the Fifties scrambled with new techniques such as Cinemascope and 3-D movies. Two of the early 3-D hits were Bwana Devil and House of Wax. It is said that over 5,000 movie theaters in the mid-50’s were equipped to show 3-D movies. Interestingly, 3-D movies are now more popular than ever.
Scrabble was a product of the Fifties. Originally called Criss-Crosswords, the board game exploded in sales when game manufacturers Selchow and Righter bought the rights from James Brunot of Connecticut and renamed it Scrabble. Both Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers, by the way, turned down Scrabble as a viable product. Scrabble now features electronic versions and is as popular as ever.
And how about Frisbees? In 1957, Wham-O acquired the rights to a throw-able disc and renamed it Frisbee after discovering that was the name given to the UFO-shaped toy by young people in New England, who referenced the similarities to products from the local Frisbie Pie Company. Frisbees remain popular today among all ages, and especially with dogs, but never was the Frisbee as popular as when it emerged as another great Fad of the Fifties.