Thursday, January 10, 2008

Hey, isn't that plane flying a little low?

(click ad for closer look)
Eerie print ad for Pakistan International Airlines (as a commenter says, at least it wasn't for Saudi Arabian airlines) from 1979 promoting their NYC service. This is the third retro ad I've seen with a World Trade Center visual that makes me cringe. Time for a vote: which is the eeriest:
• this one here.
• this 1981 one for an asbestos company.
• or this 1984 ad for the WTC itself?
(image via)

18 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

um. i'ma go with this one is the creepiest (via pia). my stomach flip-flopped when i saw it.

10:22 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Could only be creepier if it were an Afghanistan Air (or Saudi Arabian Air) ad.

10:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

That heaven one is eerily foreshadowing.

11:18 AM  
Blogger EPM said...

Someone told me that when the plans for the World Trade Center were underway, the owner of the Empire State Building took out a series of newspaper advertisements with a picture of a plane flying into the towers. From what I understand, since they earned quite a bit of revenue from broadcast towers atop the Empire State Building, and since they stood to lose that business if someone built a taller building nearby, they wanted to scare people out of building one.

I've never seen the ad, though, and can't verify that it actually existed.

11:43 AM  
Blogger Chris said...

Via Pia by a landslide.

11:50 AM  
Blogger guestofaguest said...

One on the right. A small plane flew into the Empire State Building I think sometime during the 40s or 50s.

12:25 PM  
Blogger copyranter said...

It was 1945 and it was an American B-25 Mitchell bomber.

12:28 PM  
Blogger Jessica Ferri said...

the heaven one really disturbs me the most. this post reminds me of the time i was cleaning out my childhood bedroom, only to find an art project i did depicting "nuclear winter." my idea was a broken statue of liberty and collapsed trade towers. i drew that thing in 1998.

1:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My vote is for VIA PIA being the eeriest, although the smoke alarm ad makes me really sad more than anything.

2:24 PM  
Blogger Mike D said...

I found a drawing that my brother did in the late 80s which showed a plane crashing into the WTC. It was kinda freaky.

4:49 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

check out the GRASSY KNOLL collection...

http://www.vyzygoth.com/photo.html

5:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

elijah m said...
Someone told me that when the plans for the World Trade Center were underway, the owner of the Empire State Building took out a series of newspaper advertisements with a picture of a plane flying into the towers. From what I understand, since they earned quite a bit of revenue from broadcast towers atop the Empire State Building, and since they stood to lose that business if someone built a taller building nearby, they wanted to scare people out of building one.

Yup, even creepier the ad was titled "the mountain comes to Manhattan..." as opposed to 'Mohammed', riffing on a passage in the Koran. The jet illustrated is roughly at the angle of Flight 11, There's a reproduction of the ad in the book "City In The Sky"

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=17-0805074287-0

9:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't forget the album "Party Music" by the Coup. The original cover featured the two band members apparently detonating the WTC about 70 stories up: http://www.geocities.com/sscwon/coupparty.html

Looks kinda familiar now.

The cover had already been designed, but hadn't been printed on 9/11. The record company changed it to a hand holding a martini glass or something.

9:49 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

plane one for sure.

10:53 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The PIA one has got to be the creepiest, the others don't have planes in them and the photos are pretty peaceful.

By the way, the plane that flew into the Empire State Bldg was a bomber in the 40's, maybe '44, on a foggy night. Remarkably few casualties.

And no one's mentioned where they were, but I'll go ahead. I was on 28th and 8th Ave., having listened to 1010Wins reporting the first plane crash, and was looking right at it when the second plane hit. Then I got on the downtown E and headed straight to the WTC. Things got more chaotic from there. Weird day.

12:50 PM  
Blogger vanderleun said...

PIA. Going away.

2:54 PM  
Blogger Carla said...

So now that Bin Laden was found - in Pakistan - that makes this even creepier to me. For all I know, that ad might have given them the idea to use WTC as a target ..

8:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The standard black joke in Pakistan about PIA or Pakistan International Airlines is that PIA stands for Please Inform Allah.

Knowing that it's creepier still

2:14 AM  

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