Judge, 1928-01-28 · page 8 of 36
Judge — January 28, 1928 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# "A Romance of the Air" — Judge Magazine Satire This page satirizes Hollywood's impractical filmmaking through two interconnected stories. The top cartoon mocks a proposed movie about a subway romance; a studio executive explains they can't make it because building an actual subway set would be wasteful—the structure couldn't be reused. The satire criticizes Hollywood's obsession with spectacle and sex appeal over logic. The longer story below parodies romantic aviation films popular in the 1920s-30s. A pilot and aviatrix fall in love, skywrite marriage proposals, and honeymoon "in the clouds." The joke deconstructs the fantasy: their marriage immediately crashes into "nosedive," leaving them divorced but "saved from the wreck." The closing joke about "Dora" thinking Brooklyn Dodgers are pedestrians is unrelated wordplay—typical of Judge's miscellaneous humor pages. Overall, the satire targets Hollywood's sentimental fantasies about romance and aviation as audience escapism disconnected from reality.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
the first day, Du and meets a handsome guard, who, it develops later, is a mil- lionaire in disguise and is j working in the subway so won't get sunburned and so he ‘an study people at close quar- ters, as he is writing a book. They marry and live happily ever after, but not on his pay as a guard. So much for the story, which is not so much. The difficulty lies in producing it. As one movie official said, when the subject was broached: “The overhead would be too great. You see, we should have to build a subway of our own on the lot, and after we got it built and had taker! the picture, what good would it be. The subw mean. It wouldn't go and so nobody would use sides, we'd rather have sex ap- , and we'd need too many ex for a picture like this, and it would probably be too deep for our audiences And so the matter rests. —R. C. O'Buien A Romance of the Air (With the Almost-Inevitable Disaster) She was an aviatrix, and he was a high flyer himself. They fell in love, and it was the first time either had fallen. Natu- rally it gave them a thrilling sen- sation. When they realized it, neither could catch their breaths. ZX i 7 Aiete a, Sr Burorar—Look vere! Devense Lawyen—We propose to show that this brave little woman murdered her husband in a fit of insanity due to the fact that they had a crazy quilt on the bed! They built castles in the airs they figured on a plane wedding and a honeymoon away up in the clouds, Or away up above the clouds, where they could see nothing but the silver lining. He skywrote her love letters. Everybody knew they were in love. It was no secret. He used up the whole sky in telling her how much he loved her. In the bottom left-hand corner of the sky (over and above the gas Is this fair to an outsider? house) he made so many X's up- lookers thought he was playing tick tack toe. So, after a dizzy courtship, they had a sky pilot join them. Up they went in the direction of the castle they had built in’ the air, As they watched the earth skimming from under them, he remarked that they were letting the rest of the world go by, and soon they both thought they were in heaven, But. after a while, things started going wrong, and_ they both realized their flight) was more one of the imagination than nything and that they could not go on much further. Then the good ship Matrimony went into a nosedive and they soon found themselves back to earth. There was nothing saved from the wreck but themselves. Then, as usual, came the cele- brations. He celebrated the dis- solution of the partnership, and she did the same. But not to- gether. Poor Dora is so dumb she thinks the Brooklyn Dodgers are pedestrians. 7 comicbooks.com