6/17/10

Ozark Airlines - Yee-HAW! You're Flyin'!

Today's post will be a quickie, as time is short. It's a perfect opportunity to use this fantastic painting of an Ozark Airlines ad from 1963.

Ozark who? Yep. News to me, too.Ozark Airlines operated from 1950 to 1986, at which point they merged with TWA.

So who's their mascot? Some kind of bird, possibly of a species indigenous to the lower middle section of the U.S. You know... America's abdomen? Apparently the idea  of a bird talking is not as strange to me as a bird talking without opening his mouth, heh.

Never mind that. What a great painting. Brush strokes and charcoal. Click through to a higher resolution version or have a slightly grimmer day.

When I think of Ozark Airlines, I think of Hillbilly Hare, the Bugs Bunny cartoon that takles place in the Ozarks with the Hatfield and McCoy guys feuding. People remember that cartoon for the square dance sequence, but the picture in my head is the whole feud, taking place in the hills. The guys had those nine foot long rifles that made me laugh. The bullet took about three seconds to reach the end of the barrel.

Funny thing about the name "Ozark". Wikipedia (which seems good enough for most non-controversial research topics) says that ""Ozarks" is a toponym believed to be derived as a linguistic corruption of the French abbreviation "aux Arks" (short for aux Arkansas, or "of Arkansas" in English). It even cites a book as reference. How bout that? Great. Now I have to look up "toponym".

1 comments:

Craig F. said...

Back in 1983, Jerry Lewis made one of the worst movies of all time, entitled Cracking Up.

However, it had one hilariously memorable scene:

It had a cameo featuring famous inebriate Foster Brooks as the pilot of a discount regional airline.

Inside, passengers with pigs and chickens and goats were seated on the floor of the airplane, which was covered in hay. The flight attendants provided an in-flight meal, which was a scoop of gruel served from a bucket.

The name of the airline was "Jolly Fats Weehawken Airlines."

I am assuming they used Ozark Airlines as the model.

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