Judge, 1923-05-19 · page 14 of 36
Judge — May 19, 1923 — page 14: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This cartoon satirizes both Ford automobiles and a contemporary film. The joke centers on a movie called "Zander the Great" starring actress Alice Brady, which involves travel from New Jersey to Arizona by car. The satire has two layers: First, it mocks Ford's advertising claims about durability and reliability—the caption jokes that the car mysteriously travels across desert highways "apparently dustless," an absurd exaggeration of Ford's marketing. Second, it ridicules the film's melodramatic plot (a child's "radiation of innocence" reforming criminals), treating the contrived storyline as equally implausible as a Ford performing automotive miracles. The bootleggers reference dates this to Prohibition era (1920s-1933), when such films exploited contemporary crime concerns for entertainment. The cartoon appears designed for Judge magazine's sophisticated audience to laugh at both automobile advertising excess and Hollywood's sentimental storytelling.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“The Latest Ford Joke”—by Ralph Barton By exposing them to the radiation of in- mocence emanating from a little child, “Zander the Great,” Miss Alice Brady melts down and refines a band of callous bootleggers operating on the Mexican border. This is the miraculous Ford in which Miss Brady and Zander travel from Weeweedin, New Jersey, to the bootleg-ranch in southern Arizona, over apparentiy dustless high- ways.