Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, October 1921 · page 27 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #25 — page 27: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is satirical commentary on 1920s film censorship and the "Streisand Effect." The piece mocks New York picture censors who recently banned images of women in bathing suits, specifically: 1. **Dallas beauty pageant winners** in one-piece bathing suits 2. **Hope Hampton's seal-skin bathing suit** (a luxury item that cost $1,000 but was necessarily minimal due to seal skin's expense) The censors justified banning Hampton's suit by claiming it violated Atlantic City ordinances—an absurd technicality since it was taken in New Jersey. **The satire's point**: By attempting to suppress these images, the censors actually achieved the opposite effect. New York newspapers printed the "forbidden pictures" anyway, giving them far more publicity than they'd have received as regular film content. The text also references boxer **Jack Dempsey** and fighters **Tom Gibbons** and **Georges** (likely Georges Carpentier), suggesting this piece dates to the early 1920s when boxing was major entertainment. The overall message criticizes censorship as counterproductive and hypocritical.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 25 back again, next winter, to fight Tom Gibbons. Georges made a gallant and inspiring fight against Jack Dempsey but, around the neighborhood, they were not quite so strong for him. It is certainly an awful thing to contemplate; but if the new picture censors of New York have their way, the world is due to be a lonely void without any one-piece bathing suit girls. The first thing they did on taking office recently was to throw out the picture of some Dallas, Texas, young ladies who won the prizes for having the best—well, y’ know—bathing suits and so on. Hardly had the metropolis recovered from this shock when the censors ruthlessly stepped on Hope Hampton’s thousand dollar bathing suit which recently gave Atlantic City a thrill. Of course, you understand that Hope’s bath suit was made out of seal skin; and seal skin is so awfully expensive that she naturally couldn’t get such an awful lot of it for a thousand dollars—and that was the kind of suit it was. The censors gave the indignant Miss Hampton a funny reason for their official “thumbs down” ruling. They said that her bath suit was against the city ordinances of Atlantic City—and they couldn’t stand for that—even if it was in New Jersey. Whereupon most of the New York papers promptly proceeded to print both of the censor forbidden pictures, thereby giving them about a dozen times the publication they would have had on the screen.