Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
For years, Toronto tourism ads have gotten a bad rap. These attempts to bring visitors to our fair city have a knack of running off the rails—try finding the love for the Toronto Unlimited campaign.
Today's ad proves this is not a recent trend, even when the provincial government is the culprit.
When you hear "Toronto," are images of totem poles and children building castles on a sandy beach the first scenes that come to mind? One suspects these were not the prime attractions for 1950s travelers either (though the ROM would have been one of the few places in the region to publicly display aboriginal works at the time). Did the ad agency mix up the clip art intended for Toronto with that for Vancouver? Even the "Exhibition" could apply to both cities, since the drawing is so generic, the scene could be at the PNE as much as the CNE.
Our happy nuclear family may not have gotten to know Toronto in its 125th anniversary year. Father can only laugh at the travel bureau's folly, especially when they failed to warn him that the city all but shut down on Sundays.
Source: Toronto '59: One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Anniversary
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I'd imagine that in 1959 it was still safe to swim in all of Toronto's amazing beaches.. That was probably a decent draw back then.
The only way this ad could have been better is with a 5th and 6th unrelated typeface.