Juno MacGuff takes one look and replies, "Seriously?"

October 30, 2015 5:11 AM

The Funky Little Football Phone That Sold a Million Magazines.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI (33 comments total)

Very interesting read and bonus young Roger Sterling to boot, thanks!
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 5:45 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

But it also had to be memorable enough for people to want to plunk down $55 a year to get it.

What a weird word to work in. Plunk? I haven't heard that in years.

Shampaine raced back to the office and found an in-house designer named John Plunkett.

OH I SEE. Very clever, Erik Malinowski.
posted by almostmanda at 5:48 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

they paid Hemingwy top dollar for his piece about the Princess phone
posted by thelonius at 5:51 AM on October 30, 2015

This was also just a few years after the breakup of the Bell System when you could finally buy your own telephone instead of being forced to rent one from AT&T which was manufactured by Western Electric as part of your basic service. A lot of people were ready to try something new.
posted by three blind mice at 6:06 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I bet it had a switch for pulse dialing so that you could use the buttons even if you lived in the sticks and didn't have touch-tone access yet.
posted by octothorpe at 6:14 AM on October 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

My family business documented the entire trillion page legal mess of the MCI lawsuit and breakup of AT&T, but the aftermath of shitty shitty shitty cheap shitty fucking shitty awful shitastic novelty telephones was the end of enjoyable telephone conversations and the beginning of priming the population for the misery of cellular "telephones" and the ergonomic disaster, sonic offense, and oft-interrupted connections that were the price we paid for trading the design mastery of the 500 telephone set for the privilege of being able to be bothered by a piece of glass in every moment of every day.

In my house, every single phone is a lovingly restored and maintained 500, but I keep a Swisstel on hand lest I forget what deregulation and eighties atrocity designers wrought…and that's even before we all fell in thrall to freaking blobject design. Leave it to the Reagan reign of error to make you long for the days under a monopolistic megacorp.
posted by sonascope at 6:28 AM on October 30, 2015 [19 favorites]

I remember the influx of inexpensive novelty phones, and other phones that looked more ordinary but came in rainbow colors and sold for $10 or less at the corner drugstore. Almost all of them were terrible; you'd hardly be able to hear your callers, if they didn't just quit working altogether. I lived in a house with a bunch of other young adults and we'd have extensions all over the house, everyone had their own. But the plain and expensive Bell phone in the kitchen was the workhorse we all reached for when we could.

I was the one who bought that Bell phone at the Bell Phone Center store in the mall. It was an investment; probably half a week's salary. But I was sick of having my local callers sound like they were in Antarctica. I still have that phone today; it is my landline phone still. Not that I talk on the landline more than once in a blue moon. But in 1988 I used the landline a lot, and I wouldn't have touched a football phone with a stick. That ilk of phone was terrible.
posted by elizilla at 6:37 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Between this FPP and the Time-Life paranormal book club FPP, it's good to know I'm not the only Mefite who spent a fair share of the 80s in front of the TV.

I'm still waiting for the Sweet Pickles Bus to show up.
posted by dr_dank at 6:40 AM on October 30, 2015 [7 favorites]

I had a summer job as a teenager taking subscription orders over the phone for Time Telemarketing (which handled SI and others) around 1983, so it was after this premium was offered, but they were still using lots of premiums. Desk clocks, wristwatches, etc. Once in a while, the floor managers would show us the premiums being offered. They were uniformly as shoddy as you'd expect, so I'm really surprised to learn how well the football phone has held up.

The premiums were really popular. It was clear that a lot of people regarded their subscription as a side benefit or even an irrelevancy next to the premium, and were quite insistent about knowing exactly when they'd receive the premium.
posted by adamrice at 6:55 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I owned one of these things when I was a teenager and had my subscriptions to SI and Car & Driver. It was as terrible a phone as you think it would be- fragile, terrible call quality and ugly as all get out. It was a shameful relic of a shameful time in my life.
posted by KingEdRa at 6:55 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

speaking of the sudden glut of shitty novelty phones, my favorite by far is this one, which represents a inside-out design aesthetic I miss very, very much.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:22 AM on October 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

I always liked the commercials with the football follies. Buy Sports Illustrated, and will send you a VHS tape featuring people making major mistakes and getting fucked up in the process. Or just watch the long free commercial and have your lulz now. Dad will respect you for laughing even if you still don't know what offsides means.
posted by aydeejones at 7:22 AM on October 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

This also makes me want to invent a retro wall hanging handset phone that has all sorts of smart phone features and can play Netflix movies from the palm of your very hands but still must be plugged in. Because I still have the sense of humor and I had when I was 18, I guess
posted by aydeejones at 7:27 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I bet it had a switch for pulse dialing

Actually, I bet it was pulse only. We had a phone we got as a premium with a Life magazine subscription in the 90s, and despite having buttons, it didn't support touch tone at all.
posted by primethyme at 7:30 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

Thank you, Metafilter, for bringing back a part of my childhood this morning. These commercials had moved pretty far back in my subconscious, but rewatching them this morning brought me right back to my parent's couch. I've probably seen the John Slattery commercial 100 times without ever making the connection that it was him (very odd to see him without his signature white hair).

I'm pretty sure someone got me a subscription to SI for my Bar Mitzvah in 1986, but don't recall getting any good premium gifts along with it. Maybe they took it for themselves.
posted by The Gooch at 7:36 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

speaking of the sudden glut of shitty novelty phones, my favorite by far is this one, which represents a inside-out design aesthetic I miss very, very much.

That one, like my translucent Swisstel, was brilliant in showing you exactly how cheap and hatefully insincere your phone was, though it added the touch of painting everything bright eighties eyeball suicide colors, right down to the PCB and the steel weights that they put in solely to trick you into thinking that there's actually some substance to your cheap, terrible-sounding phone. I will give them credit for still including a bell, however, because phones that beep shrill beeps that hit you in the bones like the scream of a dental drill make me want to become a highly successful murderer.
posted by sonascope at 7:53 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

adamrice:I had a summer job as a teenager taking subscription orders over the phone for Time Telemarketing (which handled SI and others) around 1983

Was Julie the Time-Life Operator as cool as she seemed on TV? Was this theme piped in to the call center on repeat?

This is why I love Mefi. Somebody mentions the Fraggle Rock book club and somebody else will pipe up to say that their neighbor threw the books through the TV.

Disclaimer: This actually didn't happen....yet.
posted by dr_dank at 8:00 AM on October 30, 2015

sonascope, I can't tell you how much I enjoy your commitment to phone aesthetics/quality.

My best friend's mom kept paying "phone rent" on her AT&T phone long after you could just buy your own phone, and they let her, till my mom talked to her and told her to stop throwing her money away. It was an avocado-green wall-mounted version, as I recall. I don't know if they came and picked it up or just said "eh" and let her keep it. It would have been at least 10 years old at that point.

I liked the light-up buttons in those smooth, curved wall-hanging phones, they were nice to push. They made a pleasing "clunk" when you hung them back up, also.
posted by emjaybee at 8:01 AM on October 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

Cuba Gooding Jr. was to be cast in one, but it fell through after a disagreement centering on his hair.

I wish they had expanded on this...
posted by Sangermaine at 8:41 AM on October 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

When my grandmother started having trouble getting to the phone in the early-to-mid 1990's, I had to remove the wired-in phone she'd had since the early 60's and wire in a jack so she could have a cordless. Easy job. Later, when I tried to wire the phone back in (for forgotten reasons), I ran into an interesting problem. The instructions said to wire in the four cables. This phone only had three. You could call out, calls could come in, but the phone no longer rang (so you didn't know that people were calling in). I still have it somewhere in storage, and I intend to tackle the problem again sometime and use it as my landline. Or as a self-defense weapon. That thing is *heavy*.
posted by bentley at 8:56 AM on October 30, 2015

One additional service this article provides is that tidbit on the typical cost of VHS tapes. It still blows my mind that, once upon a time, movies on VHS could cost up to $100. I still have a 1989 Blockbuster Catalog that my parents purchased for two bucks. Part of the reason I keep it is for nostalgia, but the main reason is to be reminded that video producers once had the utmost gall to sell copies of William Shatner's "Impulse" for $79.95.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:08 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was working in a video store back then, and people were so excited when Indiana Jones came out at $20 a copy. We must have had a couple hundred pre-orders for that.
posted by InfidelZombie at 9:27 AM on October 30, 2015

weren't blank VCR cassette tapes just as expensive?
I could have sworn when I was a kid, my father coming back home and holding up a blank VCR cassette tape (we were a Beta family) like it was the ark of the covenant
posted by bitteroldman at 10:22 AM on October 30, 2015

It still blows my mind that, once upon a time, movies on VHS could cost up to $100.

This was called "priced to rent", the idea being that video rental stores would still fork out the $100. I think these were typically movies that consumers wouldn't be interested in buying directly in the first place.
posted by neckro23 at 10:54 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's a protection model for the rental market, much the same way Netflix and Redbox get their releases throttled as not to cut into the VOD sales. With VHS, the newest releases would be full MSRP at $100, stimulating interest in the video store rentals. Once that ran its course, it would be marked down into "sell through video" and priced at $20 or so at consumer retail.
posted by dr_dank at 12:05 PM on October 30, 2015

Football phone? PPfft! For me, it was all about my awesome Garfield phone.
posted by medeine at 12:06 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

but the aftermath of shitty shitty shitty cheap shitty fucking shitty awful shitastic novelty telephones was the end of enjoyable telephone conversations and the beginning of priming the population for the misery of cellular "telephones" and the ergonomic disaster, sonic offense, and oft-interrupted connections that were the price we paid for trading the design mastery of the 500 telephone set for the privilege of being able to be bothered by a piece of glass in every moment of every day.

Oh, christ, save the anti cellphone rose colored glasses nostalgia stuff. I half expected the next paragraph to launch in to how smartphones were ruining social interaction and making people stupid.

My grandparents had western 500s. We had one at my parents house for quite a while when i was younger. I've actually used one pretty recently, and my modern cellphone even when it can't use wideband audio/HD voice sounds SIGNIFICANTLY better. Noise cancelling was a revelation, even indoors, for being able to understand what people were saying. And now even the cheapest shitbutt $30 smartphones have it. Headset speakers and mics have also significantly improved since at the very newest real design revision, the late 60s with the western 2500. Hell, i bet newer ones actually started using even crappier cheapo parts for that stuff.

Every time i call a landline it sounds noticeably shittier, with background noise, a huge notch to the frequencies getting through, and poor dynamic range. A western 500 doesn't sound all that much better.
posted by emptythought at 1:21 PM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I had this one!
posted by Naberius at 1:51 PM on October 30, 2015

Oh, christ, save the anti cellphone rose colored glasses nostalgia stuff. I half expected the next paragraph to launch in to how smartphones were ruining social interaction and making people stupid.

Well, first, it's not nostalgia—I have had a harvest gold wall set and a black 500 in my apartment for every single one of the twenty-seven years I've lived in this apartment, and before that, my phones moved with me until I got here, and those have not been replaced because nothing's come along to improve their function or warrant their replacement (Notably, both are more than forty years old and continue to work perfectly with a little oiling every fifteen years or so, unlike the drawer of dead cellphones I have), so it's more a continuity than some sort of retro movement.

There are plenty of things that are great about modern cell phones, but at their presumed original purpose, they are just ridiculously inferior to what they've replaced. Trying to have a languid, relaxed conversation on a device for which ergonomics have been completely and entirely supplanted by the demands of being a good portable computer terminal is a trial. My Western Electric handsets don't get hotter and hotter as they're used, until it's like talking to an iron, and I've never dropped a call on my end or had someone complain that the connection's gone all wonky or decayed ito downsampled aliasing bitscratch like bad sound design work from a cheap horror movie. I can cook a full meal while gossiping my ass off, with the handset neatly propped between my shoulder and ear and the yellow cord bobbing around my kitchen as I work.

It's cool to be able to call people from the road and have a conversation, or to call home from the store and ask about ingredients. It's great to have a camera on hand at all times, and very cool to essentially have the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made real for when I'm facing the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal in a dark alley, but when I want to just have a conversation, a cell phone is as inviting as a telephone as a the picture of a keyboard on a tablet is when I feel like writing—works, after a fashion, but life is too short for always putting up with third best.

Of course, I live in the future when it comes to Facetime, and that's what a cellphone is good for, when the wifi on both ends is good and you can be face-to-face with distant loved ones. Oh, you want a bush baby? WORLD OF THE FUTURE.

When I just want talk, though, I want a clear comprehensible voice and hours of chatter, nothing beats a handset designed by people who didn't surrender all form to the seductive purity of Dieter Rams. I'll take a little trace of background hum and a bit of high-end roll-off over trying to keep a flaming hot deck of cards pressed against my ear with my aching handclaw between waiting for the other person to call me back.

But whatever works, you know.
posted by sonascope at 3:57 PM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

sonascope: " the misery of cellular "telephones" and the ergonomic disaster, sonic offense, and oft-interrupted connections that were the price we paid for trading the design mastery of the 500 telephone set for the privilege of being able to be bothered by a piece of glass in every moment of every day."

That price was so worth it, though. Yeah, I remember that you could play music to someone over the phone. That was neat. But totally not even 0.1% as neat as what I do with my phone now.

AlonzoMosleyFBI: "It still blows my mind that, once upon a time, movies on VHS could cost up to $100."

Yeah, but don't let that trick you into making the mental jump that once upon a time people paid up to $100. Like, I knew lots of people with VHSs, but I didn't know anyone who actually bought a prerecorded tape until the prices suddenly plummeted to around $20 with the VHS release of Batman. Before that, it seems like the $100 price tag wasn't really intended to serve a "Buy now for just $100!" role as much as a "If you lose this Blockbuster tape, you will have to pay a replacement fee, and VHS movies cost $100" role.

sonascope: "My Western Electric handsets don't get hotter and hotter as they're used, until it's like talking to an iron, and I've never dropped a call on my end or had someone complain that the connection's gone all wonky or decayed ito downsampled aliasing bitscratch like bad sound design work from a cheap horror movie. I can cook a full meal while gossiping my ass off, with the handset neatly propped between my shoulder and ear and the yellow cord bobbing around my kitchen as I work."

You're right about the ergonomics of flat phones preventing shoulder cradling (though, to be honest, they sold foam attachments for regular phones because shoulder cradling hurt, but the difference was in the old days it was "You can cradle, but it hurts" versus nowadays "You can't cradle at all"). But beyond that, I've never had a cellphone that gets hot enough to be even mildly uncomfortable. I've never had a dropped call. I've never had a wonky/decayed/downsampled connection. Maybe you just buy really shitty cellphones, or have a really shitty carrier?

sonascope: "aching handclaw"

Wait, okay, now you've got to be taking the piss. I understand "I can't cradle with my shoulder, so I have to use my hand, which is inconvenient", but you're saying "I have to use my hand, which hurts?" It's less painful to do the shoulder pinch-crunch than to just...hold something in your hand? You've evolved a prehensile shoulder and lost the ability to use a prehensile thumb?
posted by Bugbread at 4:51 PM on October 31, 2015

Just to illustrate, with my actual phones:

Exhibit A: Cellphone has no form, practically no depth. You can't really wrap you fingers around it without having your fingers against your face, and there's no physical earcup to register the handset in place. You end up holding it around the edges, and stability is dynamic.

Exhibit B: 500 handset is sculpted to the form of the hand. The bridge allows a low-tension grasp with four fingers loosely wrapped around, and the thumb fits neatly into the contoured junction between the bridge and the earpiece. The grip requires limited force, and stability is passive. The convex earcup provides a natural registration point to the ear.

I'd love to find a single ergonomic analysis that favors the former over the latter, but in my experience, the latter experience is comfortable, with the device designed to conform to its use, while the former is much less comfortable, because I'm expected to adapt to the demands of the machine. To each their own, of course, but I find it a little sad that we've essentially chucked out a hundred years of progress towards better industrial design in favor of fashionable thinness and a cheapening of expectations.

You can, of course, work around this by plugging a pair of headphones with a microphone element, and in my case, that's what I do if I'm stuck having a long conversation on a cell phone. It's fiddly and requires accessories and a shirt pocket, but that's the tradeoff. I've got no problem with the world of the future, but I do wish we'd get some new visionaries in the design field who could imagine something other than 2001-style monolith slabs. The fashion fads rule, though, which is fine if you want an amazing portable computer terminal, but less so if you want to spend three hours on the phone with a distant friend, talking about Doctor Who.
posted by sonascope at 9:44 PM on October 31, 2015

sonascope: "I find it a little sad that we've essentially chucked out a hundred years of progress towards better industrial design in favor of fashionable thinness and a cheapening of expectations."

I agree overall about the ergonomics, but I don't understand why you think that fashionability and fads are the reason for the current shape. You even say it in your last sentence: "fine if you want an amazing portable computer terminal". That's why all phones look like identical slabs now: you need a flat screen, which determines the shape of the front of the unit. And it's portable, which means it needs to fit in the pocket, which determines the shape of the back of the unit. The fact that there's little decorative trim, etc., is fashion, but fashion isn't what accounts for the difference between this and this, it's what accounts for the difference between this and this.
posted by Bugbread at 7:54 AM on November 1, 2015

I'd agree that the old Western Electrics were engineering marvels but I don't miss having to use a phone that was wired to the wall. I hated having to stand there next to the phone while I talked. And I've never once noticed a cell phone getting hot to the touch while I talk. Maybe I don't talk long enough?
posted by octothorpe at 8:26 AM on November 1, 2015