From The Brand Historian’s Timeline

Dwarves were big box office in 1937. Snow White, premiering in Disney’s first full-length feature was befriended by seven, meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Gandalf departed the Shire for the Misty Mountains with a troop of 13, plus of course Bilbo the bonus burglar aka The Hobbit. The dwarves’ natural enemy was the Goblin, which by a strange coincidence was the name of a bedside tea-making appliance also launched this year and known to people of a certain demographic as the Goblin Teasmade. It was in many respects the Nespresso of its day. 

The other two iconic brands launched in 1937 did not make it into Tolkien, as far as I know, but a close re-read may be necessary….The first of these is Old Spice – but hold that Carmina Burana tsunami of refreshment and steady the Wieden and Kennedy dude you could smell like, because the first Old Spice range actually consisted of toiletries aimed at women based on founder William Lightfoot Schultz’s mother’s native American pot pourri recipe. We chaps had to wait a little while before that more macho aftershave braced our decorticated faces. The other great launch of 1937 was Spam, Hormel Foods’ wonderful solution to the American pork shoulder mountain, which may or may not have been mixed with spiced ham to create a whole new protein category that remains very big in Hawaii to this day. Oh, and thanks to that 1970 Monty Python café sketch, the brand name was hijacked by early internet enthusiasts who needed a word to describe the increasing surges of pointless, irrelevant and unsolicited electronic messages. Thus did the brand make a triumphant return on Broadway in the brand extension Spamalot, which thinking about it, might just have featured a few dwarves? #branding #brand #marketing #history