Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Plastic Pink Flamingos

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Plastic flamingos started out as innocent yard art, transformed into folk art, and have become a (kind of mean) symbol of high campiness. There’s a lot to this particular plastic yard art. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is short stuff. We were talking at long last about a topic

that has been on my list for short stuff, since basically the first time we came up with short stuff, which is pink plastic lawn flamingos, one of the all time great pieces of yard art anyone's ever come up with. Do you own them? No, I'm not mean. Okay, you're not mean?

Oh, you'll see. I'll describe why I think owning a pink flamingo is kind of mean. Oh, interesting. All right. Okay. You're gonna do that after the break? Is it gonna be a setup for a teaser?

Yeah, maybe that will be a setup. Let's tell them first about the origin of these things. Everybody knows what we're talking about, right? Like the plastic pink flamingos that people had on their lawns, especially in the 50s and maybe the 60s. Nowadays they're super kitschy and campy, but plastic lawn flamingos, right?

That's right. They were created by a man named Don Featherstone, who was a sculptor who was hired by Union Products from Leo Minster Mass or however they pronounce it there. Sure, there's some strange pronunciation for that. Right. And they are the plastics capital of the world and he created the very first one

as his second work assignment in 1957. Yeah, Union Products had 2D flamingos and they also had ducks. And his first assignment was to turn the ducks from 2D into 3D. And the ducks were the longtime biggest seller. It was called duck and ducklings. And people would put plastic ducks like on their yard

as if they were just hanging out in their grass. Yeah, so Featherstone created the flamingos. They cost about $2.76 for two of them because you gotta sell them in pairs. I think they're still sold in pairs. Yeah, you gotta have a little buddy. You don't just have one. Then that's, by the way, that's about $25.50 today.

Yeah, so it's a pretty good deal today because they're what, like $15 or $16 now? Yeah, yeah. So apparently they came about because this was the beginnings of sort of the cookie cutter subdivision revolution. And if you wanted to put something in your yard to make yourself stand out from your neighbor,

a pink flamingo was a fine way to do so. Yeah, and the pink flamingo was chosen to be like the second one because the pink and everything Caribbean was super in. Like Tiki culture was kind of big around that time. And it was a smash hit. Like people started buying them by the boat loads. The moment they hit the market, it just was perfectly timed.

It was exactly what everybody was looking for. And they were still, you know, 25 bucks isn't free, but they were affordable. Basically everybody who could afford them. And so they became this kind of emblem of suburban working class culture. Like that was a certain group of people prized pink flamingo law and ornaments

and put them on their yards non-ironically. That's very important. Right, which is a very big reason why in the 1960s, there was a backlash against them. Like so many things in the 1950s that mom and dad loved. The 60s came along and the hippie said, I'm done with that, screw your conformity. I'm not going to play your games.

I'm counterculture baby. And those lawn gnomes and flamingos are terrible. Get them out of here. But then of course the 70s roll back around and they're like, hey man, who cares? Those things are cool. Let's bring them back. But the reason that they were cool

and the whole reason they came back, you can make a really strong case is because of a single American director out of Baltimore, Maryland named John Waters. That he is basically single-handedly responsible for bringing back the pink flamingo. But the key difference is that when he brought the pink flamingo back, he brought it back

and ran it through a completely different paradigm so that it came out the other end totally schlocky, totally campy and lost every bit of earnestness and was completely saddled with irony from that point on because he created a movie in 1972 known around the world is one of the most offensive movies ever made that he called pink flamingos. That's right.

And I guess before we take that break to find out why they're mean, why you feel they're mean, we should mention that John Waters, who I just called Roger Waters and did a retake. I feel like I should point out. Gay icon in the USA. And so as a result, gay bars started using pink flamingos as mascots and you could find at drag shows,

you could find them on earrings of performers and on their high heels. And then, you know, it kind of became sort of this a symbol for gay America in the 70s in the United States. High, high, high camp. High camp. All right, let's take a break. We will take that break.

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. All right, and we're gonna follow up with a little bit more right after this. Oh. On the podcast, pay dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's vapor because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck, stuff you should know. OK, so when John Waters, like, breathed a second life into pink flamingos, pink lawn flamingo ornaments, when they came back, they were brought back, like he said, in the gay community big time.

But then they also kind of spread out further and further into the larger community in America and became kind of part and parcel with pranksterism, like they were frequently put on people's lawns prank, basically like what person could possibly want lawn pink, lawn flamingos, right? So if we put them on somebody's lawn, it's a hysterical prank.

But also in some way, and I think a lot of people didn't realize that they were necessarily doing this, but it was part of the whole second life of it, was mocking the people who originally enjoyed pink lawn flamingos earnestly and mocking their taste. And that is why I think pink flamingos are kind of mean these days.

Oh, so you think if you put a flamingo up, it's sort of a hipster, ironic, making fun of it kind of thing? Yeah, so do you remember, you know how mom jeans are back? Sure. I could not find this article, I searched all over for it, but I read this article, which is basically a count of somebody in the fashion industry who was there when mom jeans were brought back.

And they were brought back in this really mean spirited way among like little 20 something wave models who basically wanted to rub it in the faces of moms, how good they looked even in their frumpy mom jeans. And that's how mom jeans came back. That to me is basically the same principle behind bringing back the pink flamingos. The way that John Waters put it is that they become

loaded objects, classist tools of the well to do, mocking the taste of the less fortunate. And that he says that the real plastic flamingo is in a sense extinct, you can't have anything that innocent anymore. I get it. I realize I'm being a little high blown and high flutin' about this whole thing, but I just found it really fascinating that the idea that it is,

it has this certain level of mockery that you're mocking the taste of people who ever thought those things were neat and enjoyed them on their, you know, at face value. Sure. And I think both of us are kind of anti-ironic, you know, flaunting ironically. Yeah. At the same time though, sometimes we just got a mellow out.

Well, that's true too. I mean, we're not upset about this or anything, right? Are you mad? No. I'm just kidding. It's all good. So a few more things about the flamingos though, a couple of neat things.

In 1979, if you are familiar with Madison, Wisconsin, and the university there, they planted over 1,000 of these in the grass in front of the dean's office. And then many years later, I think they paid homage to that in 2009, in honor of this prank, in the city town council named the Pink Flamingo, the official bird of Madison. That's right. So the 70s were huge for the Pink Flamingo,

but the 80s were even huge for the first time ever in the history of union products. I think in 1985, six or seven, the Pink Flamingo outsold the duck with ducklings law and orderment. And some people say, well, it was just, it was the 30th anniversary of the Pink Flamingo, so it was getting more pressed and it had this revival. Other people say, no, no, no.

It had nothing to do with the 30th anniversary. It was the popularity of Miami Vice that brought Pink Flamingos back. But again, brought them back in this way that people weren't really enjoying them at face value. There was something kind of campy or funny about having the Pink Flamingo in the front yard. Well, here at our zoo in Atlanta,

one of the very first things that you see when you walk in are the flamingos standing there on one leg. And I think we should do a full episode on flamingos at some point, because they're really neat. And my daughter was so taken with them, we ended up getting her a large flamingo painting for her bedroom that was like 20 bucks at a flea market. And she's enjoying it earnestly, isn't she?

No, she loves it. That's great. So then all of you pink flamingos who are mocking it, who are mocking Pink Flamingos, you're mocking Chuck's daughter directly. That's right. Just think about that. And there's this other cool thing that I hadn't heard of.

It's sort of like a chain letter that gets passed around. So here's how it works. What you do is you're trying to raise money for a charity and have a little fun while you're doing it. So at night, instead of like teeping somebody's yard, you will set up flamingos in the yard of a house or a business and there's a sign that says this flock has been placed here for this charity

and a dollar will come pick these things up for a dollar or piece that goes to this charity. And then that gets passed on to another yard like a chain letter. Right, which is funny. Like I got a shout out Smithsonian Mental Floss and Thought Co. for helping us out with this. But I think in the Mental Floss article,

the author is clearly much younger than us because they say like old school chain letters from the early 2000s. It's like, no, they go back a lot further than that. I just thought that was very funny. Yeah, and I think the person, like if someone put them in my yard, put like a hundred flamingos for a charity,

I would say, all right, I'll pay the hundred bucks. And then now I get to pick and I would send them straight to your house, of course. Sure, like an old school chain letter from the 2000s. I get to pick the next house and so on and so on. Yeah, so they're clearly still around. You can still get them today. And I guess from what I read,

they still make about a thousand of them a day and use 270 million pounds of plastic to make pink plastic lawn flamingos in the United States. Well, boo to that, but yeah, the flamingos. There's also one last little tidbit, Chuck. There's a rumor, an urban legend who knows that if you see somebody with a plastic pink lawn flamingo in their front yard, it's a signal that they are swingers.

Right, but I think it's a good time to remember, not everyone with a pineapple on their grocery cart is looking to hook up and not every flamingo in their front yard means you're a swinger. I hadn't heard the pineapple one. What if somebody has a pineapple and a flamingo in their front yard? Oh, well, it's on like Donkey Kong.

Here you go, a big fishbowl with a few keys in there. That's right. Well, that's it for short stuff, right? That's right. Well, then that means short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

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