I'm a sucker for these film shorts that appear with some regularity on Turner Classics, so when I saw the title "The Wonderful World of Tupperware", I made it a point to set the alarm for 4:30 A.M so I could catch an early morning screening. I can't say this was very much entertaining per se, but it was definitely informative, down to the excruciating detail of how various bowls and other containers are painstakingly developed and reworked to produce a widely used household convenience. The narrative really brought this home when it got into elements like melt, weight and specific gravity, while I'm sitting there thinking - Come on - it's a plastic bowl for heaven's sake.
But you know what, the producers of this film didn't examine this thing with a critical eye when it was completed. Back in 1959 when this was made, and the tupperware industry was basically still in it's infancy, the assembly lines and machinery depicted already looked old and rusty. Can you imagine something like this coming out today? I think it would have killed the product to see it made with those kind of conditions present.
And lest the reader think that this experience was somewhat boring, the production wraps up with a hilarious depiction of a national Jubilee Sales Convention with entertainers Anita Bryant and Johnny Desmond singing the praises of Tupperware! I'm not making this up folks. If the songs weren't parodies of already existing songs ('My Momma Done Told Me' in Bryant's case), they might have gone Top 40. It finally all made sense to me when I stopped to consider that Dustin Hoffman was given some real valuable advice a few years later in "The Graduate", when the career guidance he was given was 'plastics'.
But you know what, the producers of this film didn't examine this thing with a critical eye when it was completed. Back in 1959 when this was made, and the tupperware industry was basically still in it's infancy, the assembly lines and machinery depicted already looked old and rusty. Can you imagine something like this coming out today? I think it would have killed the product to see it made with those kind of conditions present.
And lest the reader think that this experience was somewhat boring, the production wraps up with a hilarious depiction of a national Jubilee Sales Convention with entertainers Anita Bryant and Johnny Desmond singing the praises of Tupperware! I'm not making this up folks. If the songs weren't parodies of already existing songs ('My Momma Done Told Me' in Bryant's case), they might have gone Top 40. It finally all made sense to me when I stopped to consider that Dustin Hoffman was given some real valuable advice a few years later in "The Graduate", when the career guidance he was given was 'plastics'.