Unhelpful

Frosty’s WWII poster fun page

The six of you who read the site regularly have noticed that, for a long time, the link to Frosty’s WWII poster fun page was under the heading “where did this site go”, and for a lot longer than that, it was simply a dead link.

After preserving it for private use via a slow, fairly unreliable archive, I was debating publicizing the archive. As is not too surprising for a cob-web of several years, the provided e-mail link to Frosty has been as dead as the site. Several alternatives presented themselves:

] I could provide an unreliable link to an archive that is very often down, and is terribly slow by 28.8K modem standards even when it’s up.

] I could continue to host a private archive available only to people I correspond with regularly.

] I could host the archive publicly with a disclaimer making it very clear that this is not my creation, and that all credit is due to Frosty - whoever and wherever he might be.

I chose the latter.

I axed some advertising of the archive and of Frosty’s former free web host, a defunct web ring, and links to a guestbook that had long since been taken over by a form of life lower than spam-mailers: guestbook vultures trying to pitch their commercial services of dubious value. The nature of the archive I was finally able to get this content from is such that I also had to re-do the thumbnail icons - re-making them was much quicker than downloading them, and now they’re of a uniform size.

As for the actual poster content, none of it has been altered. Some of it can easily be mis-read by nationalists and sensitive souls whose job it is to take offense on the behalf of others. If you fit either group, I heartily invite you to find content without teeth.

One of the questions raised by the original posters (which Frosty provides a link to) that has always made me curious is whether or not the sometimes-subdued (and sometimes not-so-subtle) homoerotic images in the Navy recruitment posters was deliberate. It could be a mis-reading due to applying modern media sensibilities to archival material, of course. The ban on open homosexuality in the armed forces of the United States was put into place in 1942, but as the military generally had far more important policy issues to deal with at the time, the ban was treated with a bit of a wink and a nod during the war. The Navy in particular has, for a variety of reasons, been the least openly homophobic. Were some of the original posters an attempt to market the Navy’s less severe attitude to potential service members? I haven’t found any reading of value on the subject that didn’t either come from gay rights groups, or organizations known for stubbornly supporting this almost quaintly moronic ban.

In any case, enjoy!

Comments?