There are two popular Mad Men parodies on the Internet: The Simpsons and Sesame Street. This is the Sesame Street one and it’s pretty funny. I like how they bang their hands on the table after each time they suggest an idea. Not sure where they got that from because they don’t do that in the show. Maybe that’s a substitute for taking a drink. They drink about that often. Another thing that’s funny is that they are “Mad” men because they aren’t happy. But we know that “Mad Men” is a play on words because most of the advertising agencies were located on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in the 1960s. It also sounds like “Ad” which of course is short of Advertising. Anyway I think it’s really funny.
Props of Mad Men
I had come across this before a while ago but forgot where I’d found it. Boing Boing had a wonderful excerpt about the props on Mad Men and how things have changed over the years. There is also another site where they talk about more of the inconsistencies with the props. I’ll try to find that for you guys.
“The Collectors Weekly published a fascinating interview with Scott Buckwald, the original prop master for Mad Men. Buckwald is a fascinating character and his work on Mad Men is obsessively awesome. For Mad Men, Buckwald and his team sought out vintage taxicab meters, constructed lipstick display cases, printed TV Guides of the era, reproduced a 1960 Sara Lee cherry cheesecake box, and even cooked hamburgers that matched the time period. From The Collectors Weekly:
Collectors Weekly: When it came to the Mad Men office scenes, did you have to get vintage typewriters and pencils and pens?”
Buckwald: Well, pencils are pencils. There’s no change in the pencils, and a lot of offices were using ballpoint pens. Fountain pens had largely disappeared. Certainly for formal use, the fountain pen was still there, but not as an everyday office tool.
I thought Mad Men made a big mistake on the typewriters. They knew what the right history was, but they ignored it. The secretaries at that advertising firm would have still been using vintage-style typewriters, but they used IBM Selectrics simply because the producer liked the way they looked and they made less noise on set. So we got many letters about how they were wrong, but, again, that’s his call. And right or wrong, it’s his show. He can do whatever he wants with it.
There was a typewriter repairman in North Hollywood, California. He couldn’t believe it when all of a sudden someone deposited 24 vintage typewriters on his doorstep and said, “Make them look new.” He probably hadn’t had that much work in the last 25 years. He was probably just about ready to hang up the “Going out of business” sign and cursing the arrival of the laptop computer when all of a sudden here I come with 24 typewriters…
Collectors Weekly: If someone is drinking Coca-Cola in Mad Men, would you have to get the actual Coca-Cola bottle from 1960? Buckwald: Yes. Vintage Coca-Cola bottles are pretty easy to get, so I would get the bottles, fill them up with Coke, and use a bottle capper to press the original caps back on. We did an episode when the first canned Coca-Cola was coming out. Coke was trying to promote its first cans, but they were nothing like today’s cans. There’s nothing similar to it. Even the material of the can was different. It was steel as opposed to aluminum. So I had to remake the original Coke can, which was a blast.
Believe or not, we actually found a peanut jar in the New York area that was the same size and shape of a Coke can. It was metal on the top but the sides were cardboard. We made a decal of a Coke label and wrapped it around the jar. By the touch, you could tell that it wasn’t made out of metal, but on camera it looked like a metal Coke can.
It’s always turning one thing into another. That’s what I love about doing this. It’s always last-minute thinking and being innovative–being the mad scientist. It never gets boring because everything is different. In Mad Men, I was a 1960s advertising executive. In The Prestige, I was a 1890s magician. In You Again, I’m a 2009 wedding planner. I’ve been a policeman. I’ve been a doctor. I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a gynecologist. I get to step into other people’s lives.
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Sterling Cooper
The Sterling Cooper Ad Agency is pretty freaking sweet. It was founded by Bertram Cooper and Roger Sterling’s dad a long time ago. It’s not the biggest agency but it’s successful and boasts some high profile clients like: Hilton, Lucky Strike, and Pan Am.
Here is a photo of the office. I sit in the back right near Don’s desk.
Here is a photo of some of our employees near the front door.
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Bobbie Barrett
Played by Melinda McGraw
Bobbie Barrett is the wife/manager of comic Jimmy Barrett who was hired by Sterling Cooper to do TV spots for Utz Potato Chips. Bobbie’s relationship with the agency becomes more complicated, however, when Jimmy insults a client and Don Draper begins an affair with her. Their affair is temporarily derailed when the two have a car accident while driving to the beach. Recuperating at Peggy Olson’s apartment afterwards, Bobbie sums up her strategy for making it in a man’s world: “You can’t be a man,” she advises. “Be a woman. It’s powerful business when done correctly.” Bobbie’s relationship with Don ends when he learns she’s been gossiping about him.
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Midge Daniels
Played by Rosmarie DeWitt
A smart, ambitious art illustrator, Midge Daniels is a thoroughly independent career woman – much like the multitudes of women venturing into the workforce for the first time. Midge sets her own rules, rejecting the traditional idea of marriage and domesticity. Such “live in the moment” vitality makes her the perfect bedroom companion for Don. Her anti-establishment friends that come calling might be too much for Don, but she relishes in it. One night, Don Draper realizes that she and Roy are in love, and when he asks her to go to Paris, she declines.
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Trudy Campbell
Played by Alison Brie
Trudy Campbell is married to Pete Campbell, an Account Executive at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency. The two live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a Park Avenue apartment. Her father, a salesman for Vicks Chemical, helped her husband get the Clearasil account for Sterling Cooper. Trudy herself tried to help Pete with his literary aspirations by speaking with an ex-boyfriend in the publishing industry. Her actions on Pete’s behalf secured his short story a place in Boys’ Life. Trudy’s inability to get pregnant and Pete’s ambivalence about becoming a parent cause her anxiety.
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Herman “Duck” Phillips
Played by Mark Moses
Herman “Duck” Phillips is the former head of account services at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency. Previously, he was with Young & Rubicam in London. He’s now at Grey. In order to raise Sterling Cooper’s profile he instructed employees to land accounts with the airline, automobile, and pharmaceutical industries, with mixed results. After approaching former colleagues at the London-based Puttnam, Powell and Lowe about working there, he engineered a merger with Sterling Cooper, for which he was promised a position atop the hierarchy. His plan hit a snag when Don Draper refused to report to him, and threatened to leave Sterling Cooper. Duck has an ex-wife with whom he shares a son and daughter. He recently took possession of – and then abandoned — the family dog, Chauncey. For some time, Duck avoided alcohol; he is now drinking again.
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Harry Crane
Played by Rich Sommer
Harry Crane heads the newly created Television Department at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency. He spends much of his time at work with Pete Campbell, Paul Kinsey and Ken Cosgrove. Harry’s promotion to department head came after he proposed that the cosmetics client Belle Jolie sponsor a controversial episode of The Defenders. Although the company declined, Bertram Cooper complimented Harry’s initiative. When Harry suggested to Roger Sterling that the agency start a department devoted solely to television, Roger agreed and put Harry in charge. Although his title has changed, his salary has not increased much and he continues to share an office.
Harry is married; his wife Jennifer, who is pregnant with their first child, works at a phone company. He had a one-night stand with Hildy, Pete’s secretary, following the Nixon-Kennedy election.
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Peggy Olson
Played by Elisabeth Moss
Peggy Olson is a Copywriter at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency. A bridge-and-tunnel girl from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, she began at the firm as Don Draper’s secretary then earned a promotion by impressing her boss with copy for two accounts: Belle Jolie and the Rejuvenator. When her first champion, co-worker Freddy Rumsen, was forced to take a leave of absence because of his drinking, Peggy approached company partner Roger Sterling about getting Freddy’s office. Roger let her take it.
Outside the office, Peggy spent the night with co-worker Pete Campbell shortly before his wedding, resulting in a pregnancy. Peggy – who, like the rest of the Sterling Cooper staff, didn’t realize she was pregnant – eventually gave the baby away. Peggy also had a platonic relationship with a Catholic priest, Father Gill, who asked her to do some pro bono advertising work for the church. Peggy once bailed Don out of jail when he was being held on drunk driving charges.
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Betty Draper in Rome
Here is a wonderful comparison of Betty Draper in Rome to Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. As we know, Mad Men is a seriously complex program that draws inspiration from many of the worlds most classic films and advertising campaigns while making wonderfully tasteful references to world history.
“Ah, Rome. A perfect place for Betty and Don to rekindle the romance — who needs Paris, anyway? Betty, in complete control of herself and Don for once, effortlessly breezes through the place and captures the hearts of several men, including her husband’s. For that purpose, she gets dressed up at the Hilton’s beauty parlor, in an outfit aesthetically similar to one of the greatest Italian films of all time, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
In the film, Anita Ekberg plays a Swedish (but basically an American representation) movie star, Sylvia, who sweeps into Rome and carries away several men. Her most famous scene? The one of her jumping into the Trevi Fountain. Framing Betty against a fountain calls the image to mind immediately. Both outfits both play with black and white and involve similar makeup; the difference is that while Sylvia is unadorned and effortlessly beautiful, Betty’s creation is one of direct manipulation, with many baroque effects (the hair bow, the necklace). While Sylvia is unaware of the effect she has on her own strong-jawed man (Marcello Mastroianni), Betty couldn’t be more conscious of Don’s reaction to her flirtations.
The character of Sylvia is intended by Fellini to represent a modern American intrusion into the ancient city of Rome, which is trying desperately to play catch up. Whereas she has more of an effect on Rome than it does on her, we see by the end of “Souvenir” that the opposite is true for Betty.”