One of these Things is Not Like the Others
This collection of cigarette pack radios includes a changling. Although the all of the radios above appears to be flip-top crush-proof cigarette boxes, “Banks” is actually a beer brand. (via: AntiqueRadios.com forums)
(Banks Beer bottles, etc., after the fold..)
Founded in 1961, Banks Beer’s logo has generally appeared on a square rigged ship’s sail.
Vintage ACL bottles from Tavern Trove.
Self-proclaimed as “The Beer of Barbados” it’s not surprising to find images of the bottle on a sandy beach. (See also: Coke & Pepsi at the beach)
Banks Beer has also used a “B” shaped sail logo, as shown on the T-shirt on the right
“The year 1991 proved a watershed in the Company’s history. It marked the establishment of parent company BHL, the rebranding of the then 30- year-old beer label to include the award-winning “B” sail emblem.”
As for the cigarette pack shaped radio promotion, one can only conclude that it’s part of that unholy alliance of beer & cigarettes that has led to other experiments in brand extension.
Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design
I’m old enough that, during my child-hood, “pocket”-sized radios were made with this technology. Thinking back to that era, though I don’t remember radios specifically made to look like cigarette packs, it seems to me that the consumers of such radios would mostly have been boys in their pre- and early teens, essentially playing at being adult. No sinister tobacco-industry plot would have been necessary for most of us to equate adult-hood with cigarettes, a great many of the men around us were smokers, setting bad examples (though my own father walked-away from cigarettes when I was still younger, and I had learned shortly before then that they were ruinous).
(In any case, I am now going to grieve and feel guilty about all the transistor radios that I ruined by fiddling with them. I cannot even claim that I learned much electronics at the time.)
I used to have 1 of each of these radios. Sadly though, now, I only have one working Kent radio.