For my first post in this brand spankin’ new blog, I figured I’d post these cigarette cards.

While I’m not entirely what purpose cigarette cards served, or even how they were obtained.  I’m guessing they were either handed out at move theatres as freebies, or they actually came in packs of cigarettes, like bubblegum cards, and people actually collected them.

Thankfully, all-knowing Wikipedia has an answer:

Cigarette cards are trade cards issued by tobacco manufacturers to stiffen cigarette packaging and advertise cigarette brands.

So I guess you could by cigarettes with Katharine Hepburn’s face smushed under them?  Nice.  I am intrigued and yet slightly repulsed by this at the same time.

Anyways, our first cigarette cards:

This one is interesting, because it states that she is going to star in Joan of Arc, a project that was quickly scrapped.

This one is great.  The misspelling of her name is a classic.  But the inaccurate facts don’t stop there; they state her hair and eyes as brown (yet they still colour her hair blond, of all things), and say her height is “5′5.  It’s possible that when she first arrived in Hollywood, she lied about her height, or something, because “5′7 is pretty tall, especially when Ginger Rogers, RKO’s biggest asset, stood at “5′4.  I dunno.

LOL ‘irregular’ features.  I guess I can see why’d they say that, though, because whoever was doing her makeup those early years decided to give her racoon eyes and that harsh dark red lipstick.  Made her look almost like an alien.

This one is my favourite.  I love how they described her eyes as “mysterious” when they were easily her least noticeable feature (I mean, yeah, they were nice and all, but they weren’t expressive like Joan Crawford’s).  Also present is the birthdate thing.   Most people know she used her brother Tom’s birthday as her own for a while, yeah, yeah, whatever.  It’s weird that they list her brithday as 1909 instead of 1907, though.  I guess this was a legit problem with writers/reporters/biographers because even Anne Edwards (who penned a lame biography I forget the name of) screwed it up too.

Brown hair and eyes, name misspelling.  Woohoo.