💎 Taboo Treasures
Atomic Toys & Candy Cigarettes: How Marketing Made Us
This week on Taboo Treasures, Bruce Witkin and Jeff Levine rewind the tape on the most powerful machine ever built — not a weapon, not a computer — but advertising.
From the birth of American marketing to the jingles that rewired childhood, we pull the curtain back on how entire generations were engineered one Saturday-morning commercial at a time.
We start where innocence met profit:
the era of sugar-drunk cartoons, candy cigarettes, and cereal mascots specifically designed to hook kids before they could spell “cholesterol.”
Then we move into the shadow economy behind those smiles —
✅ Big Tobacco funding “harmless fun”
✅ Toy companies teaming up with the U.S. Army
✅ G.I. Joe as both patriot and product pipeline
✅ “Be All You Can Be” — and the marketing budgets behind it
And finally — the crown jewel of dangerous nostalgia —
the most hazardous toy ever sold to American children:
the one that literally contained radioactive material.
A glowing plaything so surreal it feels like satire… but it was real, it was marketed, and it made kids feel like tiny gods of the atomic age.
This isn’t just nostalgia — it’s a forensic dive into the commercials that built America’s childhood… and the industries that cashed the checks.
Funny, unsettling, and eye-opening — because the most dangerous toys weren’t always the ones in our hands.
Sometimes they were the ideas in our heads.
🎧 Listen to Taboo Treasures
For forbidden history, cultural rabbit holes, and the artifacts society tries to forget.
New episodes every week from the Evio Creative Podcast Network.
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Also this week:
• The Devil Within — The Sean Sellers case
• The Ides of April — The Dagger & The Crown
• Criminal Mischief — TBA true crime
• The Devil’s Ledger — Haunted highways & Thanksgiving spirits
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