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The Tale of Two Dum Dums


I don't know which aunt or uncle had the bright idea to give us that gift, but I'm glad he/she did. It was one of those Christmases, and after getting excited with the robots and spaceship and video games, we opened this one gift and were left scratching our heads.

It was a Fisher-Price Printing Set.

Wow.

Exciting.

Yup, it was a Fisher-Price Printing Set that came with its own rubberized typeset, plastic letterpress, ink, ink pad, and colored paper. We took one look at it and went back to playing with the robots and spaceships.

Couple of months later, some of our cousins were at the house and we had quickly gotten tired of the robots and spaceships. We pulled out the printing set and decided to print our own newspaper.

It was partly inspired by the Daily Bugle and MAD magazine.
We called it: THE DAILY DUM DUM.

I pretended to be editor-in-chief. Brandie and our cousins were the reporter. They pretended to go out and get stories. When they came back from the other room, they wrote down their reports about Godzilla attacking manila, monkeys on the loose, and other normal stuff that happens in the city. Not only did they report it, they also drew the pictures of their reports.

Since this was a newspaper / magazine, it needed to have print ads.

So, me and Brandie and our staff of two made our own ads.

I think of our "major sponsors" was:

JUICY FROOT
Only 25-cents
with FREE TOY

(Yes, it had a really large headline with a really large logo and... a starburst! My God, what were we thinking?!)

I think we made/printed/published three issues of THE DAILY DUM DUM that summer.
(My mom has all three copies.)

I just remember that because maybe that was sign of things to come.
That we were going to end up in printing and publishing somehow.
And most of all, that we were going to end up in advertising.

Funny thing is, three weeks ago, Brandie was promoted to Creative Director in JWT and just today, it was officially announced that I've been promoted to Deputy Executive Creative Director.

Not bad for a couple of dum dums.

Thanks to everyone that was somehow responsible for helping us get to where we are. And thanks to whoever gave us that printing set for Christmas.

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