Sub. Messages in other media

Now, we've mostly concentrated on music and movies as sources of subliminal messages. There are, however, a lot of other places we can find, if we look closely, messages hidden in the content.
First up, and a personal favorite, are comics. Like the disgruntled Disney animators I mentioned in a couple of posts before, some comic book artists can be underpaid, angry at other artists or their bosses, or just feeling particularly devilish and decide to hide something within their panels. Most of the times, it's a subtle reference, or "easter egg", which fans will find amusing and casual readers will not even notice. Sometimes, there actually is product placement, though in the case of comics, it's a much better idea to actually make the product placement very noticeable, as kids everywhere will pay attention to Superman's advice on eating twinkies and Spider Man's choice of Kool Aid. Occassionally, the message is a huge "fuck off" to a writer which insists on being a dick, as seen on the particular case of the Jedi Bates, part of the extended Star Wars universe. In case you are still wondering about that last one, consider that being a Jedi in Star Wars makes your title "Master".
Get it? No? One more time: Jedi Master Bates. Say it out loud. If you're still not getting it, you're probably not supposed to understand it yet. You'll see it when you're older, kid.
Moving on, there are occasional feuds between competing artists that subtly attack each other in their artwork. For instance, when a lazy artist lifts a panel from another comic and just redraws it to incorporate his own characters, it will mostly go unnoticed due to the ridiculous amout of comic books out there. However, in some cases the copied artist will notice, and retaliate via a subtle insult or a full blown, barely covered accusation. Comics. They're a bloody business.
Anyway I'm going to have to cut this short because the world needs me and stuff. To be continued.

The Birth of a Myth

Now, up until now, we've only covered some dubious at best, outright false at worst, instances of subliminal messaging. I know, I know, this is a big letdown. You probably hoped for a conspiracy blog about a subliminal campaign by the government to cover up the 9/11 conspiracy. But, see, there’s a reason you have these high expectations. Once upon a time, subliminal messages were a very scary issue, one that even had the United States government banning subliminal advertisement.

1957. Recall the fifties were a bad moment for scientific rigor and experimental procedure. Just open up an old comic book and look at the promises of ridiculous strength and intelligence, just by mailing 20 dollars to this address! So, this guy, a fellow named James Vicary, considered himself a scientist. He arrived, after some observations, to ground breaking conclusions like the fact women blinked a bit less when in supermarkets. Real genius, this dude. Anyway, he did have one breakthrough, when he mounted a tachistocope one a film projector in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Every 5 seconds, and for a brief 1/3000^th of a second, he would flash two different messages, both “HUNGRY? EAT POPCORN” and “DRINK COCA COLA”. He reported that Coca Cola sales increased in almost 20%, and popcorn in more than 50%. When he started publishing these results, you can see why advertisers jumped at this idea. I can almost picture the scene where one advertiser is reading the paper and tells his coworker about this technique, and both their eyes turn into dollar signs.

Now, as you might have been expecting if you’re an avid reader of my blog, or if you just have a knack for foreshadowing, this study was a sham. Faker than Pamela Anderson’s knockers. Later Vicary admitted to the complete unreliability of his results. He then probably broke down crying wondering why his dad left him or something. But the man still left a mark on this world. It might have been fake and all, but he is the person that kick-started the entire subliminal message scare, and gave me a topic for my blog.

That’s it for today. Peace out.

Reference: http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp

Sub. Messages as self-help tools

So, you see, it's not all bad and stuff. Some people are actually NOT trying to brainwash us into a state of mindless consumerism or force sexual ideas into our young impressionable minds.

After the great scare of subliminal messaging faded away as more and more evidence popped up showing they are not as effective as they were thought to be, a new market suddenly flourished: self-helping subliminal messaging tutorials. These consist of the typical techniques that have been discussed previously (like rapidly flashing images, or listening to a recording while asleep), which promote positive attitudes or behaviors, with everything from weight loss to proactive thinking and anything in between. I'll link a couple of sites that sell (and sometimes offer free trials, because let’s face it, we all love free stuff). There also is a counterpart which concentrates on eliminating your bad habits, like smoking or other, unimportant things like nail biting and stuff.

Anyway, there is also controversy about the usefulness of these tactics. They have yet to be scientifically proven to work, and although most sites claim that studies show that they do have an effect on customers, it’s usually biased or not properly done. For example, it might be true that people who listen to a 30-minute audio clip a night about weight loss actually shed some pounds, but it results of comparing a person who is willing to pay to do something about his weight against someone who is not. I’m not outright discrediting what these sites claim; I’m just suggesting, you take it with a grain of salt.

If you by chance decide to see for yourself if these messages work or not, might I suggest that you be very careful around the internet. We all know it can be a dangerous place, but in my search for websites that sell these products, I ran into a lot of suspicious looking ones. Rule of thumb: this stuff ain’t free. Unless it’s a free trial, with a limited time window or only a small section of the program, do not expect to get it for free. If you see an offer for a free program, it is very probably a spyware or malware bot, if not a full blown, hard hitting, disk wiping, porn downloading virus.

Links below!

http://www.wordofmouthexperiment.com/

http://www.thoughtinspire.com/

I don’t usually end my posts abruptly, but when I do, I--