The triumph of the card calendar, which illustrates the biology of the female body better than anything else, spanned almost the entire 1980s and achieved greater success than almost any other advertising medium.
Although the card calendar, as an invention, existed as early as the 19th century, it began its triumphal journey in the mid-1970s with the „Card Calendar,” written in capital letters. These were the advertising mediums that developed serious exchange markets everywhere, and their common feature was the inclusion of photo models whose maximum wardrobe size could not exceed the size of the calendar itself (although they mostly had no clothes at all). These calendars represented milestones in the budding sexuality of teenage boys, and there was almost no man at that time who did not carry at least one of these, of course strictly for the purpose of keeping track of the days of the year. But how did the triumph of this iconic advertising tool unfold?
A Brief History of Card Calendars
As mentioned earlier, such calendars existed as early as the 19th century. Specifically, a card manufacturer named Giergl received permission in October 1863 to produce cards equipped with a calendar.
However, at the technological level of the time (due to the difficulties of reproduction), they did not have a particularly successful career, and during World War II, they almost completely disappeared from the country. It wasn't until the 1950s that they reappeared, and a larger spread had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s. For example, in 1962, a total of 400,000 card calendars left the production lines at the Offset and Playing Card Printing House. These little cards were initially made with charming or even funny graphics, but there were often versions that practically resembled a business card supplemented with a calendar.
At the same time, children were already fond of collecting these little cards, although adults had not yet been reached by the new craze.
Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to find information about whose idea it was and exactly when the first card calendar appeared, featuring a model dressed in material-saving clothing as the visual basis, but it likely emerged sometime in the late 1960s, thus starting the hysteria.
By 1972, the Playing Card Printing House could no longer handle the enormous number of orders and had to outsource part of the work.
From this point on, the cards continued to be printed in Pest, but the cutting and packaging were done at the Koppányvölgye Áfész plant in Karád. It well reflects the amount of work that the ladies working here received piecework pay for their assembly line work, which exceeded twice the average wage at that time for everyone.
In the same year, the Ministry of Domestic Trade also issued a statement regarding nude photographs. According to this, artistic nude photographs and such graphic and drawn representations can only be used to advertise goods that can be associated with such images based on their nature, purpose, or method of use.
Nude photographs or drawings can be used to advertise, for example, body care products, but they cannot be used — say — to promote food or other goods. The scantily clad ladies disappeared — temporarily! By the middle of the decade, there was an increase in sports events and lotteries where the grand prize was a collection of several dozen card calendars. The size of the market is reflected in the fact that in 1974, 18 million calendars were produced, each priced at 50 fillér.
But the real upswing only followed after this, with the proliferation of nude calendars in the 1980s.
The opium of the declining West
Although initially (due to the above provision) they tried to justify with bloody sweat why the model had to appear unclothed on a calendar, this became increasingly less important. Gradually, there was no need to come up with convoluted ideas that the girl was just taking her clothes to the laundry and therefore was naked, or that she was going to some department store in a swimsuit because she had nothing to wear.
It became increasingly common to simply hand the advertised product to the models or to cover them somewhat with the company logo. By the mid-1980s, there was hardly a company left that would put anything other than a New Year's greeting and a nude model on its calendar, much to the delight of Ludas Matyi. The humor magazine allocated space in each issue for the presentation of such a seductive siren in the Tücsök és bogár section.
By 1981, calendar hysteria had reached its peak, and the Játékkártya Nyomda printed 400 types of card calendars that year, although for orders over 5000 pieces, the finished work had to be approved by the local council, and this remained the case until the regime change.
Thus, the aforementioned 400 types of calendars were mostly ordered by two publishing companies, and among them, only the Gondolat Publishing Company produced 3 million copies. At that time, the Hungarian supermodels of the era, such as Enikő Sütő, Kati Rák, Andrea Rábaközi, or Ica Bíró, became truly famous.
The latter even earned the unofficial title of queen of the card calendars, as she appeared on more than 100 different card sheets by herself. The models became so famous that more and more girls wanted to follow in their footsteps.
The mushrooming model schools and courses built their enticing texts around the calendars, and a significant portion of the girls even volunteered for such photo shoots for free, as they felt this could open doors for them.
However, even such free images did not provide adequate material for the enormous demands, so it often happened that the photos made for various newspapers were soon seen by the models in calendar form as well, although no one asked for any permission from them for this.
Of course, there were already those who looked unfavorably upon the rapid spread of such calendars, and in milder cases, only criticized the self-serving nature of the nudity, while in many cases, they loudly objected to the harmful effects on the population. In 1989, a study was even conducted where married men were divided into two groups, and one team was shown such calendars. Later, everyone had to express their opinion on a questionnaire regarding how they assessed their wives, and the group „infected” with the calendar gave an average score that was 30 percent lower. Of course, the rumor did not mention what their opinion was before viewing the calendars. However, this period coincided with the end of the golden age of card calendars, as during the regime change (with the advance of porn magazines), such cards gradually disappeared, and only began to reappear in the early 2000s.
The author not only delved into the secrets of the Kádár era and marketing. In his first book, he collected the most interesting stories about the Hungarian sea in the greatest mysteries of Lake Balaton, in a kind of Lake retro style. Regarding the book, which was prepared with four years of research further details and order here
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