On the
silliness and the subversiveness of one of the 1950s’ most striking fads, the
hula hoop.
When it
comes to analyzing toys and similar material culture artifacts, one of the most
interesting and complex questions has to be why certain ones become insanely
(and I mean that word literally) popular at a particular moment. These fads have
no apparent logic, and tend to burn as briefly as they do brightly: one
shopping season the Cabbage Patch dolls or Tickle Me Elmos are harder to find
than El Dorado (I remember being in New York City one December and seeing
street vendors selling those Elmos at $300 a pop), and the next they’re
remaindered on the bargain shelves. Again, trying to analyze the reasons behind
those meteoric rises might well be a fool’s errand, and it would be easy to
make too much of social or cultural forces (rather than, for example, simple
marketing or publicizing, and of course peer pressure). But with those
provisions, I’m going to go ahead and do that anyway for one of the mid-20th
century’s most prominent such fads: the hula hoop.
Hula hoops
had been around in one form or another for centuries, but it was with the late
1950s marketing
of a plastic hoop by the
Wham-O toy company that a national fad began: beginning in July 1958, more
than 25 million such plastic hoops were sold in four months, and more than 100
million were sold in the subsequent two years. Given that particular timing and
its historical and cultural contexts, I can immediately think of a couple ways
to analyze this fad: on the one hand, the Cold War and its tensions were
significantly deepening, thanks to the USSR’s 1957 launch of Sputnik and
various other factors, and the hula hoop’s mindless silliness would likely have
seemed a welcome respite from air raid drills; and on the other hand, one of
the decade’s overall national trends was the rise of cookie-cutter
suburban developments, and it would be easy to connect that trend to a toy
and a fad which requires everyone to do almost exactly the same thing in order
to do it successfully (and which almost immediately led to group exhibitions,
contests, and other communal efforts).
Both of
those analyses seem to me to have value, but I would also highlight a somewhat
less obvious and perhaps even more meaningful connection. In September 1956, in
one of the decade’s most controversial cultural moments, up-and-coming singer Elvis Presley appeared on
the hugely popular Ed Sullivan Show;
during his performance, Elvis utilized his well-known hip gyrations (which had
led to the nickname Elvis the Pelvis), and CBS famously refused to show
anything from the waist down. As is so often the case, this attempted censorship
thoroughly backfired, with the gyrations becoming more famous than ever and the
whole experience catapulting Elvis to a significantly greater level of national
prominence. Is it possible that the hula hoop represented a national parallel,
a communal embrace of this subversive gesture and of the rock and roll
sensibility that it literally and figuratively embodied? Maybe—and in a
striking coincidence, one connecting these different cultural trends even more
explicitly, two years to the day after Presley’s Ed Sullivan appearance the singer Georgia Gibbs appeared on the
show to perform her hit “Hula
Hoop Song.”
Next
plaything tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Any fads you’d highlight and analyze?
6/12 Memory Day nominee: John Roebling, the German-born
civil engineer and architect whose Brooklyn
Bridge, while certainly his most famous (and one of America’s best known and most mythologized) project, was one of many
pioneering achievements.
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